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FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 















To my father — 
always my wisest guide 
and dearest friend 
































































"The air resounds with their song oj ecstasy, which is 
different far from their chant of anger.” 

—Maeterlinck 



FOLLOWING THE 
BEE LINE 


By 

Josephine Morse 

// 

Drawings by 
Marie O’Hara 


>t > 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1931 






COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 



Printed in United States of America 


AUG -3 1931 

©CIA 4055*4 


CONTENTS 


I 

My Introduction to a Hive 

13 

II 

From Old to New 

20 

III 

Inside a Hive 

29 

IV 

Tools and Technique 

4 1 

V 

Swarming and the Mating Flight 

49 

VI 

Beekeepers in Strange Places 

61 

VII 

Marriage Priests of the Flowers 

70 

VIII 

Joy Riding With Bees 

84 

IX 

Temperaments 

9 1 

X 

Women Beekeepers 

101 

XI 

Odds and Ends 

110 

XII 

Hunting Bees 

116 






LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


THE AIR RESOUNDS with their song frontispiece 
NOTHING WAS MORE PICTURESQUE than 
a cottage bee-yard 

THE ROYAL CRADLES for the young queens 17 
BEES CHOOSE dar\ colors for attac\ 17 

COTTAGE BEEKEEPERS practiced this method 25 
A QUEEN and her ladies-in-waiting 32 

A PLEASANT, uneventful interview 33 

ONE AFTER ANOTHER they stream into the hive 51 
THE BEES PILLAGE the flowers 81 

I TRACED THEM to a cleft in the roc\s 96 

WONG STOOD THERE for several hours 96 

TRANSFERRING a colony 97 

AND PERHAPS A STOOL under a tree 97 

LET HER TAKE her worries to the bees 105 

THE COMB MAY BE blac\ as ebony 112 

THE BEE-HUNTER with his spoils from the 
tree-hive 113 

“SEEING ONLY what is fair”— 121 

BEE-HUNTER'S diagram 123 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


I AM indebted to Gleanings in Bee Culture for 
the use of two photographs, permission to use 
several paragraphs from articles of mine printed in 
the magazine, and for the many courtesies extended 
by the editor, Mr. George S. Demuth. I am grateful 
also to the American Bee Journal for allowing the 
reprint of a few extracts previously published by 
them, and to Mr. F. J. Keeley, Curator of the Acad¬ 
emy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. , 

Lastly, I must acknowledge an unpayable debt to 
many staunch beekeeper friends, with whom I have 
had hours of interest and pleasure. 

Josephine Morse 
South Lancaster, Massachusetts 


Home at fall of eve the bees come winging; 

Happy is their flight and happier their 
singing. 

As the night draws closer and the light grows 
faint, 

Darker still their air-lines 'cross the s\ies 
they paint. 

Peace is all about them; a calm and healing 
peace 

Fills the heart and fills the mind and brings 
the soul release. 

Nothing now can trouble, nothing can dis¬ 
tress, 

Here, where bees are humming songs of 
happiness . 












Bees that have honey in their mouths 
have stings in their tails — 

—Old Proverb 


I 

MY INTRODUCTION TO A HIVE 

I HAVE a friend who says she is “more afraid 
of a bee than a bull,” and though that seems an 
exaggerated statement, I find most people consider 
a sting a serious injury and keep well out of bee- 
range, if possible. Should a bee buzz on an investi¬ 
gation tour about their ears, they fight it frantically. 

Those not familiar with beekeeping are apt to 
consider a beekeeper an extraordinary being—almost 
a magician—who charms all bees and is never stung. 
It is a fact that some people seem to rouse the 
antagonism of even the gentlest bees and others are 
attacked comparatively little by the most vicious, 
but the “magic” of it lies mainly in our own tempera¬ 
ment or manner of approach. 

Bees dislike the proximity of anyone who is 
nervous in movement or who strikes at them, so it 
follows naturally that those who are seldom stung 
are quiet, careful, and unafraid. 

But there are no real beekeepers who have never 
been stung. Accidents will happen—and—bing! 


13 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


*4 

But beekeepers do not exaggerate the importance 
or the pain of stings. We get used to them and 
usually they are not very painful. It is all a part of 
the game. 

I first became interested in bees when I finished 
school. I lived on a farm and needed something 
to occupy my time and my mind, as I planned to 
be at home and had no heavy home duties to 
perform. My father was a firm believer in the 
Gospel of Work, and suggested many occupations, 
such as pigeons, mushrooms, violets—but none of 
them appealed to me. 

Finally, he said, half-jokingly, “Why don’t you 
take over George’s bees?” 

To his surprise, I answered quickly, “Perhaps I 
will!” 

My brother George had two hives of bees, which 
he had lately discarded for skunks, foxes, and other 
animal pets. They were down back of the ice-house 
and that was the extent of my knowledge of them, 
except that every fall we had honey and hot biscuits 
after George took off the honey. 

Once a year on some chilly autumn evening he 
used to get my mother to help rig him up, with 
black mosquito netting shrouding his head, rubber 
boots on his feet, and long gloves tied securely over 


MY INTRODUCTION TO A HIVE 


15 

wrists and arms. Then, armed with a little bellows 
“smoker,” which emitted dense volumes of smoke, 
he would go down to the hives and snatch off the 
upper store chambers of honey. Sometimes before 
he beat a hasty retreat with his load, an outraged bee 
would have somehow burrowed under the protective 
layers of mosquito netting and the next day the 
rest of the family would derive entertainment from 
the sight of a puffy eye or distorted lip. Some 
years the hives were full of honey; some years not. 

I had never been invited or tempted to join him 
on these marauding expeditions, but perhaps I was 
attracted to my father’s beekeeping proposition by 
the very mystery, to me, of the bee’s life and habits. 

I read Langstroth’s Life of the Honey Bee, that 
classic in beekeeping literature, and then took a 
Short Course in Beekeeping at the Massachusetts 
Agricultural College. The two weeks’ course was 
interesting and practical. At the beginning we ex¬ 
amined bee’s legs, wings, and stings under the micro¬ 
scope in the laboratory and learned the theory of 
the profession from lectures in the classroom. To 
increase our confidence in actual contact with honey 
bees, we were encouraged to hold drones—the sting¬ 
less males—in the palms of our hands! Soon we 
were opening the hives, taking out combs and learn- 


16 FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 

ing what was happening inside the hive. . , . 

The college bees were nice, well-behaved bees and 
no one was stung. 

I went home full of enthusiasm and spurning all 
accessories sold by bee supply houses for the timid 
—such as long canvas gloves, leggings, or overalls. 
Among beginners there is apt to be an attitude of 
overconfidence, which is a good quality on the 
whole, though one which needs to be tempered by 
experience. I did, however, put a black mosquito 
netting bee-veil over my face when I went down to 
interview “my” bees. 

The whole system of modern beekeeping hinges 
around frequent inspections of the bees. Not mere¬ 
ly by watching them fly in and out their doorway 
but by taking the roof off their house—like some 
complacent giant—and lifting out some or all of the 
detachable combs which hang inside, covered with 
bees and filled with brood and honey. Some bee¬ 
keepers “open the hives” once in two weeks, some 
once in ten days, some as often as once a week. The 
theory is that bigger honey crops can be secured by 
this watchfulness; if conditions are not just right 
they can be remedied. 

The beekeeper allows each colony to practice 
Home Rule. Indeed he is helpless to prevent it, for 



Nothing was mote picturesque than a cottage bee-yard with its row of straw “sleeps 





















MY INTRODUCTION TO A HIVE 


*7 


he must always modify his manipulations to fall in 
line with their unchanging age-old instincts. But 
he benevolently supervises their activities in the 
dominion which he likes to consider his own, mak¬ 
ing changes for the best—or the worst, if he is not 
expert and wise. 

There is a Let Alone Method which often works 
admirably in the hands of a master who knows how 
to do just the right and requisite thing on the rare 
occasions when he does not let them alone! Un¬ 
doubtedly it is not the method for the beginner who 
must learn his “bee behavior” at first hand. 

How vividly the picture of that first interview 
at home is sketched in my memory. A lovely, warm 
June morning in New England with everything at 
its freshest and greenest. Flowers blooming in the 
fields, birds singing in the orchard, and bees hum¬ 
ming. . . . Yes, bees humming when I first 

drew near the hives under the big old oak by the 
ice-house, where there were few passers-by. I 
hummed, too, with pleasurable anticipation of an 
hour or so, such as I had known with the well-man¬ 
nered insects belonging to the State Agricultural 
College at Amherst. ... I remembered how 
the professor had complimented me on my careful 
handling of the combs, drawing them out of the hive 


18 FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 

so that no bees were pinched or crushed against the 
other combs. I felt quite self-satisfied and ready to 
demonstrate my skill again. 

I wore a white middy blouse with dark blue serge 
bands on the cuffs, fastening close at the wrists, and 
dark stockings with white shoes. I mention this 
because I learned something through wearing that 
particular costume which I had not heard in a lec¬ 
ture or read in a beekeeping manual—namely, that 
bees invariably choose dark, strongly contrasting 
colors for attack when annoyed. 

As I have intimated before, my brother’s interest 
in bees had not been of long duration, and I soon 
found out that he had been practicing the Let Alone 
Method and was merely a bee-robber—not a bee¬ 
keeper! The parts of the hives where the eggs 
are laid and the most interesting life of the colony 
takes place had been untouched for several years, 
and the tops of the frames had been almost com¬ 
pletely glued over with wax and a gummy, resinous 
substance called propolis. 

It seemed a well-nigh hopeless job to pry out the 
combs, and furthermore, the bees were unused to 
interference and resented intrusion. Their gentle 
humming had long since changed to a belligerent 
buzz. Those dark serge cuff bands were the main 


MY INTRODUCTION TO A HIVE 


*9 


objective, and it would have been better if I had 
rolled up my sleeves. The stings would at least have 
been more distributed! No wonder I remember 
that middy blouse, for I found that wrists are particu¬ 
larly sensitive to stings; there seems to be a multi¬ 
plicity of nerves in that region, and the veins are 
close to the surface. The dark stockings also re¬ 
ceived their share of attention. My hands, wrists, 
and ankles were soon covered with stings and I was 
forced to close the cover of the first hive before I had 
taken out more than one of the eight combs. I 
retreated on the point of tears, with swollen hands 
and a discouraged spirit, vowing never to go near 
the bees again. 

However, the saying “Once a beekeeper, always 
a beekeeper,” proved true in my case, for in a few 
days I was again at work, this time well protected 
and able, with the aid of a hammer and chisel, to 
inspect the hives thoroughly and regain my proper 
self-respect. 




The suburb of this straw-built citadel — 
—Milton: Paradise Lost 


II 

FROM OLD TO NEW 

B EEKEEPING is an ancient art or industry. 

The Egyptians, four thousand years ago, made 
long tubes of reed and mud in which to keep their 
honey bees and out of which they would now and 
then cut a comb of honey. Present-day beekeeping 
in Egypt scarcely varies from that of forty centuries 
ago. But during the last hundred years bees in 
European and Anglo-Saxon countries have been 
kept quite differently. 

Of course the organization and life of a colony 
of bees continues the same. But through scientific 
observation and study we know more about them. 
We know how to take care of them in order to 
secure for ourselves more of the precious sweet they 
store so abundantly. 

Sketched briefly, a colony consists of from thirty 
to seventy thousand bees. Among these there is 
one—and only one—perfect female, the queen, who 
lays all the eggs. During the summer months there 
are about four hundred drones, the males, one of 


20 


FROM OLD TO NEW 


21 


whom mates with the queen once and then dies. 
The remaining thousands are undeveloped sterile 
females, the “workers,” who do all the honey gath¬ 
ering and work of the hive. 

These bees live in and on their combs which they 
make of thin delicate beeswax, molded into thou¬ 
sands of six-sided cells to hold both brood and honey. 
Their food is honey, which the workers suck in the 
form of nectar from certain flowers, afterwards 
thickening and changing it into honey. 

Every year at least one swarm is cast by the mother 
colony. The colony is a family which perpetuates 
itself and the race by sending out its child, the 
swarm, made up of the queen and about two-thirds 
of the bees, to find and establish a new home. These 
swarming bees settle on something—usually a 
branch—in a clinging pendant mass about their 
queen. For a time they deliberate, sending out 
scouts to find a home. Then they depart, with a 
loud humming to their chosen destination. 

The mother colony retains a great many young 
bees and brood, also several young queens in their 
wax cells nearly ready to hatch. The first to emerge 
will kill her royal sisters and in a few days will 
mate with one of the waiting drones, and will take 
up her royal duties. Not “The Queen is dead; long 


22 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


live the Queen!” but “The Queen is gone; long 
live the Queen!” 

Probably the first beekeepers kept their bees in 
the hollow logs in which they found them; splitting 
them open and suffocating the bees inside with sul¬ 
phur fumes when they wanted some honey. Before 
long they learned that a swarm issued forth every 
summer from each normal bee establishment, if they 
were not disturbed. They learned also that this 
swarm, or cluster of bees, could be readily captured 
and put in a box or almost any empty receptacle. 
Especially were these facts taken advantage of in 
the wilds; there are still places where bees are kept 
in “box” hives—or even wash boilers! 

In the countryside, however, where peasants had 
lived for generations, things of this sort were done 
more neatly and thriftily, and straw “skeps”— 
usually dome-shaped—were woven of straw to house 
the bees. A small hole served as an entrance, and 
the bees built their combs inside in any way they 
wished. At a certain time each year the “skeps” 
were placed over a pit of smoking sulphur and 
“brimstoned;” the bees suffocated so that their 
keeper might cut out the honey in safety. 

There was nothing of its kind more picturesque 
or poetic, I am sure, than a cottage bee-yard with 


FROM OLD TO NEW 


23 


its row of straw “skeps” in the flower garden, and an 
old “bee master,” in broad straw hat and long smock, 
calmly watching the comings and goings of his 
bees. When a swarm issued forth he would beat a 
pan underneath them to induce them to alight. And 
when the master died it was a rash courting of bad 
luck to omit the ceremony of “telling the bees! ” 

These old “bee masters” may not have had the 
same accuracy of information as our modern, up-to- 
date scientific honey producers, but they often had 
a rare and delightful philosophy, not so readily in¬ 
duced by the hustling life of those who produce big 
honey crops. They did not go into the business of 
rearing queen bees (in fact, at one time the belief 
prevailed that the ruler of the hive was a king!) 
or sell their honey to middlemen by the ton, but 
they did know many simple facts fully as well. 

They knew that bees are always gently disposed 
when swarming, and that a big, grape-shaped cluster 
of swarming bees shaken down off a limb would 
“march” into the straw “skep” carefully placed be¬ 
low. Their beekeeping methods being so primitive, 
they did not know how to prevent their bees from 
swarming to secure more honey; rather, they prized 
the swarms, which allowed them to kill the parent 
colony for honey and yet have no fewer hives. 


24 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


Theirs were the old proverbs: 

A swarm of bees in May 
Is worth a load of hay! 

A swarm of bees in June 
Is worth a silver spoon! 

A swarm in July 
Isn't worth a fly! 

They reasoned that the first swarms of the year, 
in May, were the heaviest; there were more bees 
then and they worked with greatest zest. A swarm 
in June was good, but less so than during the month 
preceding. In July the summer was advanced and 
time lacking for a colony to make its combs and se¬ 
cure enough honey to carry through the winter. 

The ancient custom of beating on tin pans to 
induce swarming bees—in the air—to alight and 
form a cluster, has been subject to many scientific 
jeers during the last twenty-five years. Experts 
proclaimed it an ignorant, useless custom, and 
stated that if bees followed the sound and clustered 
below, it was not because they were attracted by the 
sound, but because they would naturally have clus¬ 
tered at that precise time and place anyway—an old 
form of argument! 



“Cottage bee\eepers” practiced this method of capturing 
swarms and were satisfied 


25 


















2 6 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


But personally, I have never felt so sure about 
the foolishness of this old practice. In fact, though 
the bees may not hear the sound (since it seems 
doubtful that they possess powers of hearing) I be¬ 
lieve that they feel the vibrations and are drawn 
toward them. 

All beekeepers know the effect on bees of jarring 
or pounding on their hive, and how, if one is driving 
them from one place to another, the bees tend to 
move toward the object on which one is pounding. 

. . . So why might they not feel vibrations when 

in the air, and be attracted toward the source? 

At any rate, the “cottage beekeepers,” as we may 
call them, practiced this method of capturing 
swarms and were seemingly satisfied with their 
success. 

Straw hives have not been in use in America for 
many years, except by a few who loved their pic¬ 
torial effect, but bees have been kept in plain, un¬ 
painted boxes in much the same manner. 

The greatest discovery, both for its practical and 
scientific value to beekeepers and bee students, was 
the movable frame hive. This hive is made much 
like a box with a detachable cover, but in the in¬ 
terior on opposite sides are two rims from which 
hang eight or ten wooden frames. In these the bees 


FROM OLD TO NEW 


2 7 


build their combs. Each frame, containing its comb, 
filled with brood and honey and covered with bees, 
is hung beside another, spaced just one and a half 
inches from the center of one frame (which inevi¬ 
tably means the center of the comb also) to the center 
of the next. When the combs are fully built, this 
leaves a quarter of an inch between the combs, 
known as a “bee-space;” the distance bees leave 
when building combs without outside interference. 

If the man-made frames were spaced wider apart, 
bridges of wax would be built across, which would 
have to be broken out each time the frames were 
removed—a slow, irksome process. 

If the space were narrower, there would not be 
room for the bees to pass each other and they would 
build cells so shallow that the bees developing in 
them would be undersized. 

On removing these carefully spaced frames from 
the hive and examining the combs, the amount of 
honey and brood, the health and general condition 
of the colony can all be discerned at a trained glance. 

What enlightenment on the industrious life of 
Apis Mellifica, the honey bee, came with the inven¬ 
tion of movable frame hives! There is now less 
guesswork and groping in the dark, and no need 
whatever for slaughter of the innocents before re- 


28 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


moving honey, as a comb of honey in its frame can 
be lifted out readily and the bees brushed or shaken 
off with little disturbance and seldom a casualty. 

With this easy removal of honey and opportunity 
to diagnose a colony’s needs and condition, began 
the era of commercial honey production. 

Since the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth invented 
his famous movable frame in 1851, beekeeping has 
made great strides. Instead of being just a backyard 
hobby, it is now a full-fledged industry, and thou¬ 
sands of tons of honey are annually shipped in car¬ 
load lots from different parts of the country to mar¬ 
keting centers. 

Rightly is the venerable old Swiss pastor from 
Ohio called “The Father of American Beekeeping.” 


So woi\ the honey bees; 

Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach the art of order 
to a peopled hjngdom. 

—Shakespeare 


III 

INSIDE A HIVE 

I T happened that when I began keeping bees 
there were no old or more experienced bee¬ 
keepers in my particular locality on whom I could 
call for help in difficult situations. There was no 
one to whom I could go as people later came to me. 

No one helped me catch swarms, or interpreted 
for me anything strange in the family life of my 
bees. I had to learn all that for myself, putting 
into practice the theories learned from textbooks 
and the agricultural college short course. Some¬ 
times I burned my fingers in the fire by ignoring 
what I read of other’s experience. 

For instance, I had of course read that when the 
mercury is high and a hive is to be moved from 
one place to another, a large space should be covered 
with wire netting at the hive entrance, as bees be¬ 
come agitated when they feel their house moving 
and rush to the doorway. This doorway, at the 
base of the hive, is low and, in old box hives, very 
narrow. If not made larger, the small air passage 


29 


30 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


will be blocked by bees, pressed against the screen¬ 
ing by multitudes behind, and all will smother. 

However, I had moved hives a few times, un¬ 
eventfully, without making the entrance larger; so 
I disregarded this particular warning, dubbing it 
something of a quibble. 

Then, one sultry August morning, I bought an 
old “box hive” from a neighboring beekeeper. Like 
other box hives, there were no frames, and the combs 
were just fastened across the underside of the top 
according to the bees’ whims. The entrance was 
only about two inches long by one inch wide, and 
the owner had fastened a strip of netting across this 
opening just before daybreak, according to my in¬ 
structions. 

By nine o’clock it was very warm indeed and the 
bees were clamoring to go out to work. 

As I drove off with the hive, their clamor in¬ 
creased. When halfway home I noticed that they 
had fallen silent. ... I was glad that they had 
quieted down. . . . But when I lifted out the 
hive at home, they were still silent. And there was 
an ominous note in that dead silence. 

As I set the hive in place on its stand and tore 
off the wire netting with trembling fingers, a mat 
of lifeless bees tumbled out. It was literally a “si- 


INSIDE A HIVE 


3i 

lence of the dead.” I poked in a stick and only 
pulled out more dead bees. Heavy-hearted at what 
I had done, I pried up the box from the bottom board 
on which it rested. There lay a great lifeless mass. 
. . . Right then, I knew all the feelings of a mur¬ 
deress . . . though an unintentional one. 

Through negligence and lack of forethought I 
had not been able to prevent a panic. About seventy 
thousand bees had rushed to their door, trampled on 
each other, crushed each other, and in the end smoth¬ 
ered to death. 

I made many mistakes and errors in judgment, 
but they increased my knowledge and self-reliance, 
as well as sharpened my judgment by my having 
to make my own decisions. 

No one told me what was what when I “opened” 
a hive—that is, took off the cover and lifted out 
the frames one by one. . . . 

In doing this the first item of interest is. . . . 
Have they a queen? Then, is she laying well? If 
not, why not? . . . Not yet mated? . . . 
Too old? . . . Injured? . . . Have they 
just swarmed or are they just preparing to do so? 
. . . Are they healthy? Are any of the brood 

diseased? . . . Are they bringing in much 
honey? ... Do they need more room for it? 


32 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


The old beekeeper’s trained eye sees and answers 
all these questions, often by just taking out two or 
three combs. If he does not see the queen in a 
strong colony, where the many thousands of bees 
often collect in clumps and the queen may be hidden, 
he does not necessarily jump to the conclusion that 
there is no queen. Instead he tilts the combs letting 
the light shine into the cells. If he finds eggs in the 
bottoms of these cells, he knows the queen has 
surely been there within two or three days at least, 
since eggs turn into small larvae at the end of that 
time. He can distinguish between the first intima¬ 
tions of the issuing of a swarm and the “play-spell” 
of young bees trying out their wings in their first 
flights. As the youngsters circle and wheel over 
their hive, marking its precise location in their 
minds, there is a close similarity to the dartings and 
circlings of bees just before they swarm. 

He knows the queen is a good queen if there are 
many cells with eggs, and ringed about those cells, 
others holding pearly white worms, or larvae, curled 
neatly in the bottom of each. Those cells in turn 
surrounded by capped or sealed cells that have a 
thin brown beeswax covering, or capping, which 
looks indeed somewhat like a little round, slightly 
puffed cap. Inside, the larvae are eating the “bee- 



A queen (just below the center) surrounded by her 
“ladies-in-waiting” 



A pleasant, uneventful interview 









INSIDE A HIVE 


33 


bread” provided them in advance by the nurse bees, 
and, day by day, acquiring wings and legs and 
changing from worms into insects. Around these 
brood cells are cells full of honey. 

The bees move about over the cells in the combs, 
busy about their respective duties. Some have 
brought in nectar from the fields and are storing it 
and evaporating surplus moisture in the chemical 
process of changing the raw nectar into honey. This 
they accomplish by “fanning;” an interesting and 
amusing sight to see them standing in ranks at 
the doorway with feet planted firmly apart, heads 
down, and wings whirring like little electric fans. 

Entrance guards, like sentries, also post them¬ 
selves in the doorway, ready to pounce on strangers 
who do not have their own special colony smell. 
They are aggressive in their duties, parading briskly 
up and down, ever ready to jump out and challenge 
a suspicious incomer. A strange bee will find it as 
much as her life is worth to penetrate the outer 
gates of a full-sized colony. With the highly devel¬ 
oped sense of smell possessed by all their kindred, 
the hive occupants have merely to get a whiff, and 
with a rush they are on the aliens, biting and pulling 
wings and legs and threatening with their stings. 

On the other hand, the spirit of small weak col- 


34 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


onies seems to dwindle with their numbers and their 
guards do not always succeed in repelling robber 
bees or other intruding insects. 

Balls of pollen—red, yellow, orange, or brown, 
according to the flowers from which it was gathered 
—are noticeable on the hind legs of some. It will 
be stored and when needed for food for the young, 
will be mixed with honey into “bee-bread” accord¬ 
ing to a recipe which they have not as yet divulged 
to the beekeeping world. . . . Their babies’ 

Mellins Food! 

There is a never-failing fascination in watching 
young bees emerge from their cells. When their 
chrysalis stage is over they make perforations in the 
roofs, or caps, of their cells and tear and break their 
way out. Feelers are first seen waving through. A 
head pushes through and draws back. Again it 
emerges and slowly, very slowly the rest of the body 
follows, drawn out with much exertion. . . . 

A tight fit inside! . . . Now it stretches itself 

a little. Its wings fold less closely to its body and 
the child takes its first steps. Lurching, feeble steps, 
which grow steadily stronger. These feeble, gray, 
down-covered little creatures are dazed and bewil¬ 
dered on their entrance into a complicated, active 
world. ... We can take them in our hands as 


INSIDE A HIVE 


35 


carelessly as drones, for although, unlike the drones, 
they have stings, they have neither strength or in¬ 
clination to use their weapons. Like all young 
things they are timid and helpless. 

It is they who become nurses to their younger 
sisters, as yet unhatched, supplying the larvae with 
bee-bread, sealing them over in their cells with 
waxen cappings, hovering over them to keep them 
warm. When the nurses are two or three weeks 
old, they are deemed mature and take their first 
flights. Round and round the hive they fly in ever 
widening circles, locating it unmistakably before 
they dart off in quest of nectar-laden flowers. 

With a puff of smoke as a control measure, we 
can look into the very heart of the home of these 
small, extraordinary insects. We can see the easily 
distinguishable queen, large and regal in figure, 
moving slowly about with a circle of attendant bees 
that never turn their backs but from time to time 
feed her or groom her with their antennae. The 
scene might be in any royal court, only that in reality 
the queen is merely being attended and nurtured so 
she may perform her functions as an egg-laying ma¬ 
chine most satisfactorily. 

The queen may live to be four or five years old, 
but rarely does she attain that great age. The egg- 


3^ 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


laying powers of the average queen begin to fail 
during her second year, and her “subjects” show no 
sentiment but set about supplanting her at once. 
Queen cells are built, and in sixteen days a young 
queen supersedes the old. Seldom are two queens 
found in one hive, although now and again a mother 
and daughter will be seen laying eggs side by side. 
Before long, however, the older lady disappears. 
The manner of her disposal seems uncertain. 

Queen rearing is a specialized business. Raised 
in great numbers, they are sold to beekeepers who 
make use of artificial supersedure. A queen is 
caught, caged with attendant workers to look after 
her, in a small wooden box, and sent out by parcel 
post. The purchaser “introduces” the caged queen 
to a hive cautiously. First he kills the colony’s 
old queen, if she is not already gone, then puts the 
cage containing the new queen in the hive for a 
couple of days before releasing her, lest the new¬ 
comer be “balled” before she acquires the colony 
odor, or the bees fully realize that they are queen¬ 
less and in need of an egg-layer. 

“Balling” is a strange barbaric practice. The 
workers form a tight, living ball about the queen 
until she smothers to death. Inexorably as they re¬ 
move her, they yet display a reluctance to use physi- 


INSIDE A HIVE 


37 


cal violence—a course which might be interpreted 
as showing an inherent respect for the person of 
their Hive Mother. 

I doubt very much that the old queen is balled 
by her bees when superseded, though that used to be 
the theory. More often, I believe, is she killed by 
the young queen, her daughter, and balling is only 
practiced by bees under the influence of anger or 
excitement, particularly toward a newcomer. 

When a queen has been “accepted,” we may see 
her fulfilling her duties under our very eyes, if the 
bees are quietly disposed and the beekeeper care¬ 
ful. In dignified manner she curves her ab¬ 
domen into an empty cell and deposits an egg 
the size of a pin head. There are many thousands 
of cells and in the height of the season she may lay 
two thousand eggs a day. Those eggs will develop 
into larvae and soon the busy workers will put caps 
over the tops of the cells, while the larvae go through 
the pupa stage of their twenty-one day development 
from egg to bee. 

Perhaps there is in the hive an empty frame from 
the middle of whose top hangs a thick, curtain-like 
mass of bees, all clinging to each other much as they 
do when swarming. They are making wax. 

For this they have another unknown recipe, mak- 


38 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


ing it somehow within their bodies. After gorging 
with honey, they gather in the place where they plan 
to build and the wax appears in very thin scales from 
several different segments of their abdomens. With 
mandibles and feet they mold it into the beautiful 
comb, composed of perfect hexagonal cells. A rib 
through the center of the comb forms the base from 
which cells are built on each side facing out and 
tipped very, very slightly upward to better retain 
the honey when nectar is coming in with a rush and 
cells are brimming full. 

A honey comb is a marvelous piece of architecture 
and a thing of great beauty in itself. Most of the 
cells in a comb are of one size—for the workers— 
but during the swarming season larger cells will 
be built, wherever room can be found, for the drones 
who, being males, are larger and need more room. 

Furthermore, if a colony has the swarming fever, 
they will build queen cells, large, long, peanut¬ 
shaped structures, to serve as royal cradles for the 
young queens. 

Wise overproduction of nature! Just as bees 
store all the honey they are able, so as not to run 
short (a bee instinct which the honey producer takes 
advantage of by removing the surplus for himself); 
just as bees, as a colony, raise many drones (though 


INSIDE A HIVE 


39 


only one is necessary to mate with the queen); 
just so do they, when planning to swarm, build 
from three to a dozen queen cells. In case of acci¬ 
dent to a queen-cell or to the young queen after 
she has hatched, there will be others to take her 
place. . . . Nature’s prodigality which guar¬ 

antees survival. 

Inspecting the combs in a bee hive is a pleasant 
and not a hazardous experience. Admitted, there 
are some persons rough and careless to such a degree 
that they are totally unfitted to be beekeepers. Such 
persons jar the hive unnecessarily or pull out a frame 
so roughly that bees are crushed against the other 
combs. The bees properly resent such treatment 
and will make their feelings known. Who can 
blame them for stinging under such provocation? 

The average beekeeper, however, is considerate 
and gentle. His movements are not jerky. Thus 
he gets stung comparatively little. When stung, he 
scrapes out the sting with his finger nail or if stung 
on one hand and the other hand is not free, he scrapes 
out the sting with a swift, heavy movement against 
his—or her—leg. 

A bee’s sting is forked on the end, with two little 
poison sacs on the other. When in action, the sting 
is driven in so forcefully that it is not withdrawn, 


4 o 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


but torn out of the bee’s body and left in the wound 
with poison sacs attached. . . . There is a cer¬ 

tain satisfaction in knowing that the bee dies soon 
after stinging. 

If the sting is not promptly removed, the smell of 
formic acid left on one’s hand tends to excite and 
anger the other bees. Yet, if it is grasped and pulled 
out as one would a thorn, more poison is pressed 
down through the sting from the poison sacs. 
When quickly scraped out, however, the average 
sting is negligible. 

I myself usually wear a bee-veil of black mosquito 
netting over my face—just to avoid risks. But if 
the bees I am to handle are of a gentle strain, I often 
go without it. 

No full-fledged beekeeper ever wears gloves! The 
best are too clumsy, for the beekeeper must use his 
fingers precisely and delicately. Who, with gloves 
on, can catch a queen bee by her wings and cut off 
one wing to prevent a colony from swarming? 

I have worn gloves—but only when I especially 
wanted to keep my hands clean—for bits of wax will 
stick tight in hot weather and beekeepers’ families 
know full well the feeling of sticky door knobs; a 
stickiness that may, or may not, mean honey for 
breakfast the next morning. 


But where was honey ever made with one bee in a hive? 

—Thomas Hood 


IV 

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE 

N ORTH of our house on the farm we had a 
lovely grove of trees which my father had 
planted many years before I began to keep bees. 
There were many varieties; beautiful white paper 
birches, a mulberry—whose fruit was shared about 
equally between the birds, my brothers, and myself 
—an Italian chestnut, Austrian pine, and English 
oak, as well as pines, spruces, and poplars. 

When I found myself becoming a real profes¬ 
sional, I moved my bees to the edge of this grove. 
A small pigeon house was also transported from be¬ 
low the barn at the foot of the driveway and in¬ 
stalled among the trees—to be known thereafter as 
the Bee House. No bees were ever kept inside, but 
it served me from then on as workshop and ware¬ 
house combined. 

The place no longer belongs to my family as 
the house burned down one spring evening, and the 
land and other buildings were sold soon after—but 
I will always remember well the happy working 


41 


42 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


hours spent in and near my Bee House, and the 
spot will always seem peculiarly my own. 

It was just a small, one-room building with a 
side door, three windows and two openings high 
up for the pigeons. Inside, I had a work bench 
with an odd but adequate collection of tools. Promi¬ 
nent among these were three articles which are 
almost necessities in a beekeeper’s equipment— 
smoker, hive tool, and bee-veil. 

Smokers are little more than tin cans with hinged 
lids and a bellows attachment which, when squeezed, 
fans previously ignited material inside the can and 
sends smoke out of the nose. Burlap or punky wood 
—anything tending to smoke and smolder—make 
good fuel. Smokers are useful auxiliaries, and it 
is the greatest comfort to have one near in time of 
stress. A quiet puff of smoke blown into the hive 
entrance and another directed under the cover as 
it is being pried up, will drive away the guards and 
send them down into the hive where they will not 
be crushed or in the way. 

A good big colony of sixty thousand bees means 
a hive full to overflowing. Even though bred of 
gentle strain, they naturally scurry to see what is 
going on when the interior of their dwelling is sud¬ 
denly opened to full daylight. On finding the inter- 


TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE 


43 


ruption a customary one, with no occasion for an im¬ 
mediate offensive, they frequently will make no 
threatening moves, but they will gather in great 
clumps on top of the frames, making it hard for a 
beekeeper to find a place for his fingers while draw¬ 
ing out frames, unless he controls the situation with 
his smoker. 

Smoke seems to frighten bees; an instinctive fear, 
reverting to centuries of experience in the woods 
when hunters smoked them out of hollow trees and 
took away their honey. Again instinct teaches them 
to hurriedly gorge themselves with honey before 
evacuating their burning home, that they may carry 
with them in their honey sacs something with which 
to start anew. 

A few light puffs of smoke from a smoker will 
drive away only those bees near at hand, while the 
others hardly pause in their customary occupations. 

A special “hive tool” is sold for apiary use, but any 
screw driver or chisel can do the same work. Yet, 
the regular tool is handier with its strong wedge for 
prying supers apart and separating frames. 

Other equipment stored in the Bee House in¬ 
cluded extra hives, sheets of wax foundation, queen 
excluders, bee-escapes, scissors for clipping queens’ 
wings, and so on. 


44 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


Queen excluders are flat frames made of parallel 
wire strands with space between each wire allowing 
worker bees to pass through but not a wide enough 
passageway for the larger, full-bodied queen. These 
frames inserted between brood nest and honey cham¬ 
ber are useful in keeping the queen from going above 
and laying eggs in cells which the honey producer 
plans to have filled with honey. . . . Danger 
of a honey consumer getting an unappetizing 
mouthful of young bee larvae when biting into a 
section of comb honey is thus eliminated! 

Bee-escapes are another, clever, everlastingly use¬ 
ful invention; small flat tin affairs a few inches long, 
with a hole on the upper side, leading into a pair of 
delicately adjusted flexible springs tapering to a 
point, through which a bee can push, coming out 
on the lower side of the device. Bees will push out 
but will not push back the other way. They could 
squirm and edge through sideways but they never 
do. Fitted into a slotted board and placed below a 
super of finished honey, the super will be cleared of 
bees without the trouble of smoking and driving 
them out. There are numerous other ways of using 
the Porter bee-escape, all with the fundamental idea 
of trapping bees from a place where they are un¬ 
wanted. 


TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE 


45 


Fine embroidery or manicure scissors are excellent 
for cutting queens’ wings. With one wing cut, a 
queen bee cannot fly, and as the only times she flies 
are on her mating flight or when going out with a 
swarm, this measure tends to control swarming. 
The swarm may start out, but the queen falls on the 
alighting board at the entrance and cannot accom¬ 
pany the rest. Therefore since they must have her 
with them, the swarm returns to their hive. . . . 

Naturally, a queen’s wing is not clipped before mat¬ 
ing, since she only mates when in flight. 

The queen does not sting, so the operator catches 
her by the wings, and with thumb and finger holds 
her firmly but delicately on either side of the thorax 
while he deftly snips off part of one gauzy wing. 

Northern apiarists, whose bees have long, cold 
winters to endure, find it pays to protect them some¬ 
what from icy blasts by “packing” them. I set my 
hives inside big wooden packing boxes and packed 
dry leaves or chaff all about them, arranging a tun¬ 
nel to an outside entrance so they should be free 
to go out when weather permitted. In the South, 
packing precautions are less necessary. More im¬ 
portant than packing, in North, South, East, and 
West, is the surety that each colony has plenty of 
stores to tide them over periods of scarcity. 


4 6 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


Various labor-saving devices, invented and pre¬ 
sented by other beekeepers, accumulated. On one 
wall I grouped blue-labeled cards, first premiums 
won for honey and wax at different fairs; each year 
it was a matter of pride to add a new one. 

Outside, I made a rough bench by the door and 
put up a trellis for honeysuckle. On one side, close 
to the house, were planted blue Canterbury Bells, 
on the east were the hives—two against the house, 
the rest ranging around in an irregular semicircle 
facing southeast on an open field, with the little 
house and trees at the back. 

My Honey Room was not in the Bee House but 
in what had once been a laundry in the Big House— 
a honey extractor fittingly occupied the most con¬ 
spicuous position in the room. 

In appearance, an extractor can be likened to a 
large, round tank with a handle connected with 
gears which turn openwork pockets inside the tank. 
Combs are slipped into these pockets and whirled 
round and round. The honey is thrown from the 
cells by centrifugal force against the sides of the 
extractor, whence it runs down below and is drawn 
into pails through a “gate” in the lower part of 
the extractor. 

Combs were brought in from the hives on a 


TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE 


47 


wheelbarrow, and the cell cappings sliced off as 
thinly as possible with a sharp, hot knife. They were 
then put in the honey extractor. The crank of my 
extractor turned by hand —my hand. Combs had 
to be reversed so the honey would be drained out 
equally from both sides of the combs. Well- 
emptied, they were removed and placed back in 
the hives to be filled again, thus saving the bees 
labor of building new combs. The honey settled 
in tall cans. While it was settling, glass jars were 
washed and scalded in the laundry tubs. When 
they were filled with honey, and labels pasted on 
their sides, there was nothing left to do but sell them. 

A little curving path was soon worn from the back 
door of the Big House to the little Bee House in what 
I called “My Domain.” It was a sunny, cheerful 
place with shade in hot weather and always a gentle 
breeze. I left it wild and natural, as best seemed 
to suit the locality and my feeling. Pine needles 
fell undisturbed, and the only landscape gardening 
I did was to prune off dead branches in early spring 
or occasionally set out a tree. 

One summer the Worcester County Beekeepers 
Association held their annual summer Field Day 
under the trees by my Bee House. Forty or fifty 
beekeepers arrived before noon, carrying their box 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


lunches and ready for a good get-together time. It 
was the usual hot, humid Field Day weather in 
August, and we were all grateful for the shade. 

After the “Social Hour,” chairs were drawn 
up and the speaking program began. Halfway 
through a lecture, the audience suddenly began to 
prick up its ears, as it were, but not to listen more 
attentively to the speaker. . . . They were lis¬ 
tening to another sound—an accustomed one. 
Unquestioning the source, the audience promptly 
dispersed to gather about a hive over which a dark 
cloud of bees was rising, singing their swarming 
song. 

Of course the little imps clustered near the top 
of a tall Norway spruce by the stone wall. Noth¬ 
ing daunted, two enterprising young men ran down 
to the barn and brought back an extension ladder 
which they leaned against the tree and mounted, 
bringing down about a peck of bees in their basket. 
After we had hived them and discussed them thor¬ 
oughly there was not much time left for the speaker. 
Fortunately he was good-natured and only com¬ 
plimented me on training my bees so well for the 
occasion! 


The murmuring of innumerable bees . 
—Tennyson: The Princess 


V 

SWARMING AND THE MATING FLIGHT 

I DEVOTED most of my time to my bees and 
to honey production. As there are very few in 
Massachusetts who do more than keep bees as a 
“side-line,” my interest became more or less gener¬ 
ally known among beekeepers and others in neigh¬ 
boring towns. 

On almost any sultry day in July or August I 
could expect to hear the telephone ring and some 

strange excited voice on the other end- 

“Is this the bee-woman?” 

“Yes-” 

“Well, I have a swarm of bees on my place.” 
“Yes?” 

“Can you come and get them for me? There 
must be a bushel of them. ... I never saw so 
many bees in my life. ...” 

“Where are they?” 

“Oh, right up in an apple tree, hanging down 
from a big branch about eighteen feet up. . . . 

Do you think they’ll stay till you get here?” 


49 



50 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


“They may. . . . But you can never tell! 

. . . I’ll come though, anyway!” 

An inward groan, as I hung up the receiver, 
snatched up my bee-veil and my little tin smoker— 
the beekeeper’s best friend—in which I burned old 
burlap, giving a cool, thick smoke. 

Sometimes the telephone caller would only want 
to get rid of the bees, and in that case, if I needed 
more colonies in my apiary, I was always glad to 
take them. 

There are few sights in nature more thrilling than 
that of a swarm, when twenty or thirty thousand 
bees burst from their hive and whirl in a dense black 
cloud through the air, alighting on a limb or a 
fence post or any convenient “hanging-out” place, 
till they have fully decided on their future home. 

Then is the time to secure them, for the next time 
they take wing they will go in a straight “bee-line” 
to their destination, often a mile or so away. To 
reach them it may be necessary to climb an old 
apple tree or put a ladder against the side of a barn 
and mount to the very eaves in order to shake or 
brush the bees off into a box or pail. 

The swarm hangs in a big, warm, cone-shaped 
mass most wonderful to see and touch. Full of 
honey and in such a sublime sort of intoxication are 



One after another they stream into the hive 


Si 

















































5 2 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


they that handling is an easy matter. . . . The 

beekeeper, if he wishes to create a sensation, may 
even poke his fingers gently into their midst and 
detach a handful to show to amazed onlookers. 

And now for a very beautiful spectacle! When 
the big empty hive is ready, the bees are shaken from 
their receptacle onto a sloping board or a sheet lead¬ 
ing up to the hive entrance, and in they “march.” 

One after another they stream into the hive, the 
queen carried along by the rush of the others. On, 
on, on they go, without a look or step backward. 
. . . Thousands of little figures, like a miniature 

army, all clad alike in golden-banded uniforms of 
service. Till at last all are in and a hum goes up 
from the hive telling that they are happily settled 
and starting to build comb. 

But if the queen should happen to have lost her¬ 
self in the grass or under the hive, or if she has been 
injured and unable to accompany the others, they 
will enter their new domicile reluctantly and move 
restlessly about inside searching for her, and a dis¬ 
tinct cry of discontent and anxiety will be heard. 

When the queen is picked up and put inside the 
hive, their reluctancy to enter vanishes and their joy 
as they rush in to rejoin her is touching. 

Now that the swarm is hived and a new com- 


SWARMING AND MATING FLIGHT 


53 


munity started, we can leave it and go back to the 
old mother-hive from which the swarm came forth. 
. . . Little seems to be going on about the en¬ 
trance. . . . Few bees fly in and out, and when 
the cover is lifted off the hive seems comparatively 
empty. 

Nevertheless, examination shows that there are 
still some bees left in charge and that there are thou¬ 
sands of young bees who will soon emerge from their 
dark, tight little cells. Also there are half a dozen 
large, important-looking queen cells capped over 
with wax. 

If one is broken open a young queen will be found 
inside. She may be just on the point of biting her 
way out or she may not yet be sufficiently developed 
to emerge for several days. In the bottom of her 
cell is a mass of white “royal jelly,” a highly con¬ 
centrated honey food which, with the enlarged cell, 
has brought about her development, from an or¬ 
dinary worker-bee egg, into a fertile queen, instead 
of a worker, or sterile female. 

For the queen can lay two kinds of eggs at will— 
drone eggs or worker eggs. When the workers wish 
a new queen, they simply make a large cell, transfer 
a worker egg into it, and supply it bounteously with 
“royal jelly.” 


54 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


A day or two after the departure of the swarm, a 
young virgin queen will crawl out of her cell. Her 
expectant people having gnawed around the top rim, 
her cell has quite a perfect little lid which she pushes 
up as if on a hinge. 

After five or six days she has gained strength and 
must soon settle down to her mission in life as an 
egg-laying machine. 

Admirers of Maeterlinck’s writings are happily 
familiar with his study of bee life, entitled La Vie 
des Abeilles. The gifted, mystical poet and philoso¬ 
pher soars, with his queen bee, to great impassioned 
heights, yet his treatment of the entire subject is 
complete and scientific. 

No one has described the mating of the queen 
so beautifully as Maeterlinck. He makes of it a 
veritable ecstasy and truly it seems so. 

She always mates on the wing and supposedly her 
wedding flight and her flight later with the swarm 
are her only glimpses of daylight. Only once does 
she need to be mated and she tries her wings and 
then sails aloft, high into the heavens. Her mate 
may be a drone from her own hive or one from some 
hive a mile away, but whoever reaches her must be 
strong and swift. They mate high up in the sunlit 
air and then whirl down to earth together. The 


SWARMING AND MATING FLIGHT 


55 


drone dies soon after, but the queen returns proudly 
to her hive to receive the homage of her subjects and 
to lay the first of the thousands of eggs she will lay 
during her two or three-year lifetime. 

Since the workers live only five or six weeks in the 
summer, many eggs must be laid so that the num¬ 
bers of those who die will be replaced. 

In the winter the colony does not exactly hiber¬ 
nate but clusters together over the combs, eating 
honey and keeping warm. Life is so much less 
strenuous than during the summer’s harvesting that 
the young bees hatched in the fall live through till 
spring when brood-rearing starts again. 

Apis Mellifica, “the honey-maker,” has been an 
object of interest to poets, philosophers, historians, 
and scientists for countless centuries—as far back 
as records take up. 

Many centuries ago, Pliny described the trans¬ 
portation of bees up the River Po: As soon as the 
spring food for bees has jailed in the valleys near 
our towns, the hives of bees are put into boats and 
carried up against the stream of the river in the 
night, in search of pasturage. The bees go out in 
the morning in quest of provisions and return regu¬ 
larly to their hives in the boats, with the stores they 
have collected . This method is continued until the 


56 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


sinking of the boat to a certain depth in the water 
shows that the hives are sufficiently full, and they 
are then carried bac\ to their former homes. 

Even earlier, this aquatic form of migratory bee¬ 
keeping was pursued in Egypt. Plants bloomed in 
Upper Egypt six weeks earlier than in Lower Egypt, 
inducing the beekeepers of the latter region to pack 
up their tubular mud and reed hives and convey 
them up the Nile to Upper Egypt, timing their 
journey so they arrived there just when the flowers 
were budding. They followed the blooming season 
on their way back, stopping during the day, moving 
at night—taking advantage of honey bees’ customary 
return to their hives at nightfall. 

John (Jan) Swammerdam, one of the most emi¬ 
nent naturalists of the seventeenth century, was a 
great bee enthusiast. Born in Amsterdam in 1637, 
he studied the profession of medicine and took his 
doctor’s degree in 1667. However, he neglected his 
practice through a passionate devotion to the study 
of insects, making special researches on the anatomy 
of bees. He also investigated the metamorphoses of 
insects, thus laying the foundations for their natural 
classification. His absorption in these studies greatly 
distressed his father, who had adequate means and 
supplied his son with funds—but not for that pur- 


SWARMING AND MATING FLIGHT 


57 


pose. Scientific studies of such nature were not then 
held in high regard, and the father felt ashamed and 
aggravated that his son’s brilliance should be so 
employed. When he withdrew all financial support, 
John Swammerdam suffered many privations which 
injured his physical and mental health. 

His great work is The Boo\ of Nature, or the 
History of Insects. The microscope was then in its 
infancy, and it is doubtful if he ever used more 
than what we would term magnifying glasses. But 
his dissections were very delicate, and he puts the 
breath of life in his discussions and conclusions. 
The fervor of his enthusiasm and devotion to his 
“Cause,” under the most trying circumstances, are 
inspiring. 

I own a rare and valuable old copy of The History 
of Insects, translated into English from the original 
Dutch and Latin edition and printed in London in 
1758. I never tire re-reading that section of the 
book entitled: “A Treatise on the History of Bees: 
or an accurate description of their origin, generation, 
sex, economy, labors, and use.” 

According to Swammerdam, the French origi¬ 
nated the name of “bee-bread” for pollen. He says: 
“The French give with great propriety the name 
BeeS'bread, Fain des Abeiles, to the farina or dusty 


58 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


substance lodged in the antherae of flowers . It is 
certain that they eat this, and that it is afterwards 
converted into wax in their stomachs, for they col¬ 
lect vast quantities of it when they have no combs 
to ma\e, and use it merely as food” 

It is not strange that with his limited facilities 
for investigation, the great scientist should have en¬ 
tertained the mistaken belief that wax was made 
from pollen. 

The book is illustrated with beautiful copper 
plates, showing the anatomical structure of the bee. 
These plates are explained and discoursed upon in 
the text in very animated, intelligible fashion—with 
frequent digressions and philosophizings, which re¬ 
veal the character and spirit of the author. 

He wrote in quaintest phraseology, at once naive 
and shrewd and he never ceased to marvel at the 
wonders of Nature. 

“Certainly” he says, “the nature, disposition, and 
structure of these insects are so surprising that they 
without ceasing loudly proclaim God f s goodness, 
wisdom, power, and majesty” 

Vergil’s Fourth Book of the Georgies treats solely 
of the care of bees. Dryden’s translation of the work 
is quaint and charming. What a delightful begin¬ 
ning! 


SWARMING AND MATING FLIGHT 


59 


The gifts of heav’n my following song pursues, 
Aerial honey and ambrosial dews . 

The ancients considered honey as the dew of 
heaven which fell on the flowers and was thence 
gathered by the bees. 

Together with the cottage beekeepers, Vergil be¬ 
lieved in the efficacy of the drumming method with 
swarms. Witness this advice: 

But when thou seest a swarming cloud arise, 

That sweeps aloft and darkens all the s\ies, 

The motions of their hasty -flight attend, 

And \now to floods or woods their airy march 
they bend . 

. . . Then mix with tinkling brass the cymbals 

droning sound — 

Straight to their ancient cells, recall'd from air, 

The reconciled deserters will repair . 

Furthermore, Vergil, like all others of his time, 
thought the one regal personage in the hive, a king— 
Him they extol, they worship him alone . 

They crowd his levees and support his throne. 
They raise him on their shoulders with a shout 
And when their sovereign s quarrel calls them out, 
His foes to mortal combat they defy. 

And thin\ it honor at his feet to die . 

Having no exact knowledge of the actual happen- 


6o 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


ings inside a hive, the poet was obliged to draw 
solely on his imagination. He pictures thus the fall 
of night, according to his own fancy! 

When once in beds their weary limbs they steep, 
No buzzing sounds disturb their golden sleep . 

. . . ’Tis sacred silence all . 











He hath a bee in his bonnet lug. 
—Scotch Saying 


vi 


BEEKEEPERS IN STRANGE PLACES 



NYONE who handles bees much cannot fail to 


3 -be impressed with the intricate and involved 
form of their life and the simplicity and har¬ 
mony which nevertheless—and most marvelously— 
prevails. 

I have heard their colony life described bitterly as 
feminism run amuck, but I think the criticism some¬ 
what harsh, for though the government is in the 
hands of the females it is well-ordered. All seem 
happy, and contentment is the rule; save when rob¬ 
ber bees, or a careless beekeeper, try to break into the 
hive, or when in the autumn the drones are killed 
ruthlessly. But those are exceptional occasions, and 
the critics, usually cynics and often males, fail to 
dilate on the unmistakable joy bees take in their 


work. 

The ears of a beekeeper readily distinguish dif¬ 


ferences in the sounds made by his bees. . . . 
The steady undisturbed hum ... the angry, 
combative zzzzzzzz which makes the beekeeper in- 


61 


62 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


stinctively reach for his smoker, knowing that for 
his own comfort the bees “need a little smoke” . . . 
the high joyful note of welcome to a queen, if they 
have long been queenless ... the loud busy 
song when there is a great press of work and a 
corresponding increase of happiness. 

Their activities are all directed, as were those of 
the ancient Romans, for the good of the community, 
not the individual. Therefore, in the autumn the 
workers of the colony refuse to allow the drones to 
live through the winter on the bounty of the hive. 
Through the summer they have done little but take 
an occasional flight to get up an appetite. . . . 

Death would claim them before spring anyway, and 
a new drone supply will then have to be reared for 
mating-time. So why should these big lazy fellows 
continue to sip on sweets they did not help to gather? 

To conserve their stores, the greatly preponderat¬ 
ing number of workers push the weaponless drones 
out of the hives, threatening them with their stings— 
threats which are only a bluff, however, and a bluff 
which is not “called.” Outside, in the cold fall 
nights, the sensitively organized drones perish. If 
they try to return, two or three bees will jump on 
them and pull off a wing or leg. Not pleasant to 
watch. But is there not some form of cruelty in 


BEEKEEPERS IN STRANGE PLACES 


63 


every kind of life? And how little, comparatively 
speaking, disturbs the harmony of the hive! 

In the life and achievements of the honey bee, 
nature’s economy and extravagance—purposeful 
extravagance—can easily be seen. 

Economy, in the finely constructed hexagonal 
cells, whose sides fit together in a way which mathe¬ 
maticians have declared to be the most saving of 
space which could be devised for a honey comb or 
any similar structure. 

Extravagance, as we have mentioned previously, 
in the overproduction of drones and queen cells and 
the storing of honey far above their needs. 

Bees are very adaptable. They will build their 
combs with equal readiness in a hollow tree, in the 
partitions of a house, in a wash tub, a grocery box, 
under a rocky ledge (in warm climates), or in a 
modern, movable-frame Langstroth hive, that has 
an attendant beekeeper. 

At one time, I had to stay out west for a year and 
a half. Although I was very happy in the West, a 
year and a half seemed a long time to be away from 
New England and my bees. No opportunity to see 
or do anything with bees offered itself. In fact, I 
hardly saw a bee, except casually on the flowers, 
until shortly before I took an east-bound train home- 


6 4 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


ward. Then within a short period of time I had 
several interesting bee experiences. 

I was wandering lazily one day in Palm Canyon, 
a strangely beautiful place filled with ancient, lofty 
palms, near Palm Springs. 

Turning up a little-used trail under the shadow 
of a cliff, I stopped abruptly, arrested by a familiar 
sound in the air over my head. There was no mis¬ 
taking it. It was bees! I looked about and traced 
them by sound to a cleft in the rocks above. Yes, 
sure enough, there they were, thousands of them, 
flying in and out, working as only bees work when 
gathering a great harvest. Their combs were partly 
distinguishable in the dark crevice. 

I had seen bee establishments in many hollow “bee 
trees,” and taken out bees and comb many times, 
but never before had I seen them living in that sort 
of place with so little protection and their combs so 
exposed. It made me realize anew that although it 
was December it was also Southern California! 

I climbed up till my eyes were level with the col¬ 
ony and watched them with a pleasant feeling of 
familiarity. 

They were rather dark hybrids, and from my 
vantage point, I estimated they had stored away a 
good deal of honey in their combs from the wild 


BEEKEEPERS IN STRANGE PLACES 65 

lavender then in full bloom at the canyon mouth 
and on the desert. No one had molested them— 
doubtless fearing detection by the government 
ranger who sees that no one disobeys the signs 
warning everyone to refrain from touching or 
molesting anything “pertaining to canyons” per 
order of the United States Government. 

Mr. Clyne, of Palm Springs, California, is a 
proficient desert beekeeper who considers the pur¬ 
chase of bees too tame and prosaic. He scouts over 
the mountain sides and through the canyons near 
Palm Springs and captures his bees directly from 
their rocky homes. His apiary is completely stocked 
in this way. 

He found one colony, which seemed unusually 
active and populous, living in the rocks with a 
very small entrance hole and no way to see whether 
or not there was more space out of sight. However, 
Mr. Clyne shrewdly figured that where so many 
workers could be seen in such a frenzy of activity, 
they must be storing their loads of nectar some¬ 
where, He decided to find out whether his guess 
was correct. With a hammer and chisel he pro¬ 
ceeded to enlarge the entrance. 

“It was a red-hot day in August,” he told me. 
“I started out with a coat, gloves, hat and bee-veil, 


66 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


expecting trouble. They were a big, booming lot 
of bees, but queerly enough they didn’t seem to 
mind me or anything I did—I squatted on a slip¬ 
pery ledge, chipping and knocking away the rock 
right there where they were streaming in and out. 
. . . Pretty soon I took off my coat. . . . 

Then my gloves, then my veil . . . and finally 
my undershirt! And I didn’t put them on again 
either. The rock was soft—a sort of decomposed 
granite, and it didn’t take long to make an opening 
big enough for me to crawl partly in. There was 
a space inside as big as a small closet, almost filled 
with comb. I got one of my best colonies from that 
rock, as well as a wash boiler full of the best honey 
I ever swallowed—and not a sting! ” 

Guided by a friendly neighbor, I tramped up 
Eagle Canyon, in the foothills of the Santa Rosa 
Mountains and found another “canyon colony” 
there. The canyon was wild and rocky, fulfilling 
all an easterner’s ideas of what a western canyon 
should be. Jagged, precipitous cliffs of red rock 
towered above us, with gray-green growth in places, 
and a chance barrel or cholla cactus lending a 
fantastic desert note. 

At the start we found walking easy along the 
sand bed where water races down from the moun- 


BEEKEEPERS IN STRANGE PLACES 


67 


tains after heavy rains. As we mounted higher, the 
canyon walls drew closer, turning and twisting, and 
the trail led over rocks and massive boulders. 

I had strapped on my belt a hunting knife, of 
which I was inordinately proud. I never had used 
it for its original purpose of skinning and bleeding 
animals, but many times drew it from its sheath for 
various utilitarian purposes when on a tramp. I 
equipped myself with it that morning with the idea 
of cutting out some honey comb. I had a hankering 
for a taste of “wild honey,” so we carried a pan, 
a big square of mosquito netting, and a package of 
cigarettes—the two latter articles to serve in place 
of bee-veil and smoker. 

We found the bees in a shallow, easily-reached 
cavity, but a pile of burnt twigs at the entrance and 
traces of former combs plainly indicated that some 
other bee-hunter had been there before us and helped 
himself to what he could readily scoop out. The 
bees themselves were gently disposed, a few puffs of 
cigarette smoke driving them off their front combs 
back into the narrow recess under the rock. How¬ 
ever, although the combs were full of eggs and lar¬ 
vae, they were nearly dry of honey. So I did not 
fill my pan with wild honey as planned but left the 
little colony what it had and contented myself with 


68 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


inserting my knife point far into the center of the 
combs and with a twist bringing out enough honey 
—mixed with pollen—for a taste for us both. 

Perched on a peaked rock, head and shoulders 
draped in white mosquito netting, my companion, 
Mr. Hillery, took several snapshots of me, but of the 
two, I am sure he presented by far the most intrepid 
and romantic appearance. 

Soon afterwards I left the desert and stayed at 
“La Solana,” a small but very pleasant hotel in 
Pasadena. Looking out of my window one hot 
afternoon, I saw a white-clad figure scrambling over 
the roof of a garage below. 

He stopped and lifted a pole. I squinted out and 
saw he was scraping off a big swarm of bees from 
a near-by branch into the basket attached to his pole. 

Hurrying out to the scene of action, I found the 
gentleman was Wong, our Chinese chef. In spite of 
difficulties of language we managed to understand 
each other very well. We both were determined 
to have a good bee talk—regardless. And we did. 

By way of boxes and step-ladders, I climbed on 
other roofs and was surprised to find that Wong 
had fifteen colonies of bees tucked away in various 
inconspicuous roof locations. 

Another colony swarmed the next day—the 


BEEKEEPERS IN STRANGE PLACES 69 

swarm clustering on a small pear tree in the kitchen 
garden and plastering itself over part of the trunk 
and about the base of two branches. Not an easy 
place from which to secure them. Wong was not 
discouraged, however. He edged his basket-topped 
pole through the branches and leaned it against the 
tree with the basket upside down just above the 
top of the clustered swarm. Very slowly they started 
to go up into it, Wong tickling their backs with a 
wisp of grass, attached to the top of another pole, 
to encourage them on their way. He stood there 
with the true patience of a Chinaman—poking and 
pushing them for several hours, till eventually al¬ 
most all had gone up and clustered in the bottom of 
the reversed basket. Gently he lowered the basket 
and poured out the bees into an empty hive awaiting 
them. 

During these proceedings he would at times leave 
for a few minutes to go back to his kitchen, but he 
was never flurried. Still, I expected on swarming 
days to notice a difference in the cooking. . . . 

Something a little burnt or under-done or heavy. 
But our meals maintained their high standard of 
excellence and I more than ever admired Wong’s 
ability to combine the highly specialized occupa¬ 
tions of chef and beekeeper. 


And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee. 

—Byron: Lara 


VII 

MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 

B ESIDES securing their own food supply, for¬ 
aging honey bees unconsciously perform a 
valuable function in fertilizing fruit blooms and 
other flowers, thus making greater crops of fruit 
and causing flowers to bear seed and propagate. 

Mr. J. E. Crane has called bees the “marriage 
priests of the flowers.” Flower fertilization is ar¬ 
ranged in a very wonderful way and bees often play 
an important role in the drama. Pollen from 
stamens must penetrate the pistil to the ovule of a 
flower before it bears seed, and plants which are 
not self-fertilizing depend on wind or insects for 
pollination. 

Bees may often be seen on flowers, or on the 
combs, with round balls of bright-colored pollen on 
their hind legs. For their convenience nature has 
provided them with “pollen baskets”—a network of 
interlacing hairs between the leg joints which serve 
to hold the tightly packed pollen until it can be un¬ 
loaded at home. 


70 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


7 1 

A pretty sight is a sunny field of clover alive with 
bees moving from blossom to blossom, the sunlight 
catching glints of iridescence from their wings. 
Winging straight from their hives they have come, 
in a direct “bee-line” across fields, hills, and woods. 
If the field of bloom is large, their loud constant 
hum becomes a veritable roar. The flowers seem 
to yield their nectar gladly, as if knowing their 
winged visitors may also act as fertilizing agents, 
brushing against their pollen-covered stamens and 
carrying the yellow dust to other eager members 
of their family. 

As a bee travels about on a pollen or honey collect¬ 
ing expedition, some pollen is inevitably brushed off 
its legs from one flower to another. So there are 
many times when the visits of honey bees insure re¬ 
production, and hives are very generally placed in 
orange groves and apple orchards for the specific 
purpose of fertilization. 

Observation of bees as distributors of pollen is 
very interesting, but the storing of honey is what 
most interests honey producers. This, too, requires 
close observation of flora, for how can a maximum 
honey crop be secured (no matter whether it be a 
question of bread and butter or just a matter of 
“brag”), unless the beekeeper knows what flowers 


7 2 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


are going to furnish the nectar and when they 
are about to bloom? 

The blooming period of nectar-oroducing flowers 
and their quantity in the vicinity of the apiary must 
be accurately observed. If all our bees are in one 
place—and that at home—it may not take us far 
afield, but we will find that, in covering the territory 
within a radius of a mile and half of our bees, we will 
make many interesting discoveries and see many 
interesting things. Especially is this true if the visits 
are made at different times throughout the season; 
this is particularly true if one lives in the country. 

We will be astounded in finding that only half a 
mile from home there can exist a thicket in which 
we have never before set foot; or a clearing in the 
woods, or a part of the swamp never before explored 
—unexplored because they are off the usual path and 
nothing has been sufficiently strong to draw us to 
them. A note book in which are jotted down the 
dates of blooming of different honey plants will be 
interesting to compare from year to year. 

Some years an entirely new nectar source will ap¬ 
pear, such as wild carrot (Queen Anne’s Lace) 
which may be entirely nonproductive the next year. 
Nectar secretion is dependent on certain conditions 
of atmosphere—temperature and humidity—also 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


73 


the seasonal conditions of soil and plants which vary 
so much from one year to the next. I do not pre¬ 
tend to understand the scientific reasons for all the 
varying conditions in honey plants and their secre¬ 
tion of nectar, but occasionally I like to try to see the 
real cause and comprehend the natural process in 
some particular case. 

Unless completely motor- and radio-ized, children 
love to go for a walk through the woods and fields 
on Sunday afternoons, especially if there is an ob¬ 
jective—such as seeing what the bees are working 
on. And how refreshing and stimulating it is to 
throw off the cares of farm or house or business 
and get out in the open country with all the beauti¬ 
ful natural things, where the air is clean and fresh 
and all is happy and serene! We come back with 
a different point of view. 

Perhaps there is a big blueberry pasture back of 
the house, from whose blossoms is derived that won¬ 
derful, thick, rich honey, dark amber in color, with 
a reddish tinge, and a buttery, superlative flavor. 
This will need occasional inspections to see just 
when it is going to bloom. Blueberry and huckle¬ 
berry bushes like an acid soil and seem to love the 
stony New England hillsides where the bushes min¬ 
gle with those of the sumac. Although the sumac 


74 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


blooms later, it also furnishes a pleasant honey, light 
in color and of a rather greenish shade. To my taste, 
blueberry honey is the honey par excellence of New 
England. Clover honey producers from Vermont 
may take exception to this statement, but neverthe¬ 
less I do not retract it. 

Honey varies in color and flavor to a marked de¬ 
gree, according to the flowers from which it came. 
The most strongly contrasted honeys of which I 
know are sage honey, very light-colored and very 
mild in flavor; and buckwheat honey, correspond¬ 
ingly dark—almost black—and strong in taste. 
Where there are great quantities of certain honey 
plants in bloom, the resultant honey can be quite cor¬ 
rectly called clover or sage or orange bloom, or what¬ 
ever it may be. However, in many localities the 
blooming time of different nectar-producing plants 
overlap and there is a blend of two or more. Usually 
the flavor of one predominates, but not invariably. 

It is all a matter of taste as to which is best. Orange 
blossom honey is golden and delicious; clover and 
alfalfa honey are favorites in the Middle West; buck¬ 
wheat honey has its adherents in New York and 
Pennsylvania; clethra honey—water-white and tast¬ 
ing as a water lily smells—was Dallas Lore Sharp’s 
best honey in southeastern Massachusetts. In many 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


75 


parts of the United States golden rod and asters 
furnish much nectar in the autumn. 

Other countries have their famous honeys. Heath¬ 
er honey from Scotland, very, very thick and rather 
dark, sells at a premium throughout the British Isles. 
When the Scotch heather shows pinkish-purple, 
British beekeepers follow in the footsteps of the early 
Egyptians and Romans—with the exception that 
their migratory methods are not undertaken on the 
water. Bee hives are moved by motor truck or 
cart from England and the Lowlands of Scotland 
up into the Highlands where the bees revel in the 
nectar from the purple-covered hills. Honey gath¬ 
erers, honey sellers, and honey buyers alike gloat 
over the harvesting of the treasured crop. 

A delicious aromatic honey from the wild thyme on 
Mt. Hymettus in Greece should surely be “food for 
the gods,” and another of the famed honeys of the 
world is the “honey of Narbonne,” a honey from 
wild rosemary in France. Personally, I prefer the 
wild raspberry honey from northern Michigan to 
any I have ever tasted. It is thick-bodied and its fla¬ 
vor is superlative. 

Since much honey today is extracted from the 
comb by an extractor which whirls the combs around 
so fast that the honey is thrown out of the cells, later 


7 6 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


to be strained and bottled, it is hardly reasonable to 
judge honey by color alone. A very little dark- 
colored honey will darken a large amount of light 
honey, while the flavor may change comparatively 
little. 

Honey has certain natural crystals, which cause 
it to crystallize. Some honey will begin to crystal¬ 
lize, or granulate, soon after it is extracted. Grains 
will form and it will become cloudy and then sug¬ 
ary. When the entire contents of a jar has solidified 
the consistency is quite changed. Many prefer it 
in that form, both for taste and ease in handling. 

If this granulation is not desired, the honey should 
not be overheated and the flavor destroyed. How¬ 
ever, a jar of honey set in a pan of hot water for 
several hours will soon be restored to its primary 
liquid state. In the last analysis it is what pleases the 
palate that counts. 

For that reason many prefer to eat their honey 
in the comb, instead of in the liquid, extracted form. 
They say they like to “chew the comb.” Then, too, 
they like the general appearance of the little square 
section of honeycomb. Unquestionably a honey¬ 
comb is a wonderful product and most amazing 
when we consider that every bit of it was made by 
small industrious insects out of floral nectar alone. 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


77 


Master alchemists they are, for they gathered the 
nectar, changed it into honey, changed the honey 
into beeswax, molded the beeswax into combs of 
beautiful hexagonal cells, and gathered more honey 
for filling these cells. And with more thin flakes of 
wax, covered over each honey cell to preserve the 
precious contents from any dirt or deteriorating 
moisture. 

Honey has held an honorable place in history and 
legend since the days when Hebe served the Gods 
and Goddesses on Mount Olympus with nectar and 
ambrosia, or those brave times when ancient bar¬ 
barians at their feasts quaffed long drafts of honey 
mead from the skulls of former enemies. 

Nectar is still fit for Gods and Goddesses and 
honey mead is still a potent beverage! The quality 
of honey is unchanged, its quantity has increased. 
We eat it on waffles in waffle shops or put it in 
our tea! 

Yet the finest honey, thick and clear, is as much 
of a gastronomical treat as ever, regardless of the 
practical age in which we live, culling our recipes 
from Household Departments in the daily papers or 
from lecturers on Household Economics, instead of 
from the fair handmaid of Jove. 

A little imagination of our own will show ways 


78 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


to use honey besides on hot biscuits and waffles. I 
do not care for or advocate its use indiscriminately 
on and in everything from soup to dessert—but I 
do know many delicious combinations that can be 
made. . . . Honey and cream used instead of 

sugar on morning cereals (grape-nuts, for instance) 
is especially good. . . . Delicious as a sauce for 

ice cream, with pecans added. Apples or prunes 
baked slowly with honey are very rich in flavor. 

For general use in the kitchen, it seems more 
convenient to use bottled honey. A light-colored, 
delicate-flavored honey will not leave a too cloying 
taste, killing the natural flavor of whatever it is 
combined with. An exception can be made when 
it is put in dark, spicy fruit cakes, for then it mat¬ 
ters little, and some even think the stronger the 
honey the better. European bakers and confec¬ 
tioners have used honey for centuries; cakes keep 
moist longer, frostings do not get too stiff, when 
honey is an ingredient. Sandwiches of candied 
honey are especially adapted for children s picnics, 
as the honey does not run out and smear clothes, 
hands, and faces. Moreover children do not have 
a monopoly on these sandwiches, since they are also 
very popular with their parents and people of every 
age at tea time. 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


79 


Bees follow an amazing course in their careers as 
chemists, artists, and architects. Using floral nectar 
as their only building material, they mysteriously 
produce by intensive secretion of wax glands those 
fragile flakes of pure white beeswax which they 
fashion into the thousands of little chambers com¬ 
prising their homes. Time and use quickly darken 
the original whiteness of the waxen combs, shading 
them from deeper and deeper shades of yellow to 
darker and darker shades of brown. But even when 
the cells of a honey comb are nearly black, as in some 
old bee-tree, the honey sealed inside the cells is as 
clear and clean as when first thickened and stored 
there. For bees are immaculate housekeepers, scour¬ 
ing out every empty cell till it shines and dragging 
out wax particles or rubbish of any kind left around 
inside the hive. 

They use propolis, the gummy resinous substance 
on the buds of evergreen and poplar trees, profusely 
in their hives, but is is always with an object—to 
cover rough places, to fill up crevices, or to make 
their abodes water and weather-proof and secure 
from enemies. By plugging up much of their en¬ 
trance with propolis, they can guard it more easily 
from robber bees who at times of nectar drought 
hover about, ready to slip into the alien hive and 


8 o 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


carry away the stores from a depleted colony below 
par in numbers. 

When all storage room in their combs has been 
used and honey is still “coming in,” honey bees will 
build a few stray cells here and there in any available 
space in the hive to serve as extra repositories for 
the raw nectar which must be gathered to the last 
drop and converted by evaporation and other bee 
methods into honey. When a beekeeper sees these 
plain indications of lack of room, he will give them 
another super, or storage chamber, above the com¬ 
pleted one. He will insert in this super a set of 
frames filled with wax foundation (sheets of pure 
beeswax which have been pressed between metal 
mills to look like the base or midrib of a comb with 
the cell walls on either side cut down). All the bees 
need do is add more wax to build out the cells and 
attach the comb securely to the frame. Sheets of 
foundation are cut just the size to fit in one of 
the wooden frames first invented by “Father Lang- 
stroth.” They insure the comb being built where 
the beekeeper wants it, where it can be moved. They 
are not artificial combs but merely what their name 
implies, “foundations” of combs. 

Odd bits of comb are saved in most apiaries. 
Melted in boiling water, the beeswax rises to the top 



“The bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they 
ma\e honey of them which is all their own” 

-Montaigne 


8i 





























82 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


and can be taken off when cold, like fat on top of 
soup. To clarify the wax, it must be melted once 
again and strained through cheesecloth into flaring 
moulds. 

Honey is the main product of an apiary, and bees¬ 
wax is its most important by-product. Its uses are 
many, in mills, offices, and homes. Housekeepers 
know it is the best of floor waxes, dentists use it 
for “impressions” in bridge and plate work, tailors 
for waxing their thread. Innumerable are its uses 
for making molds and impressions of all kinds. 

. . . A prominent professor of horticulture in¬ 
sists on “real bees' beeswax” for grafting trees. 

“Sandy” Cairns, a young Scotchman studying for 
the Roman Catholic priesthood, came to me one 
summer for three intensive lessons in beekeeping. 
He came expressly to acquire sufficient working 
knowledge to take charge of the bees at his Seminary 
on the Hudson River. We spent three long after¬ 
noons working over the hives, while I showed and 
told him everything I could think of, relating to 
the subject. I thought perhaps the cramming had 
been overdone, but he went back to the Seminary 
an ardent beekeeper and wrote me later that he was 
supplying the table with honey and making beeswax 
candles for the altar. He became a missionary in 


MARRIAGE PRIESTS OF THE FLOWERS 


83 


China and I suppose is now teaching American bee¬ 
keeping methods as well as Christianity, to the 
young Chinese. 

The Roman Catholic Church requires the use 
of two beeswax candles, at least 50 per cent pure, 
at masses. They burn 100 per cent beeswax candles 
as well, but not so often, since they are more expen¬ 
sive. Candles burnt at Requiem Masses must be 
natural, unbleached yellow beeswax, although can¬ 
dles bleached white are allowed at other times. To 
my way of thinking, wax is more beautiful when 
left in its varied natural yellow and brown shades. 

Home manufacture of beeswax candles is quite 
simple, if beeswax, old candle molds, and string 
are at hand. Braided or twisted string, drawn tight 
through the center of each mold, forms the wicks. 
Melted beeswax is poured in and taken out when 
hard, in candle form. There is a little fussiness to 
the process but also a pleasant gratification to draw 
out a set of smooth beeswax candles from an old- 
fashioned candle mold. They are such clear, soft 
colors, pale or deep in shade; a rest to the eyes after 
the prevalent riot of Lipstick Reds, Basque Blues, 
Orange, and so on. Moreover, when burning, a de¬ 
lightfully faint yet pervasive fragrance of beeswax 
lingers in the air. 


He little dreamt, when he set out, 
Of running such a rig. 


—W. Cowper 


VIII 


JOY RIDING WITH BEES 
ALIFORNIA, often called the “beekeepers’ 



El Dorado,” is one of the greatest honey pro¬ 
ducing states in the Union. “Big” beekeepers speak 
of their crops in terms of tons and carload lots. Yet, 
nothwithstanding its almost perpetual sunshine, 
California is not covered with flowers from one 
year’s end to the next. 

The wild flowers in un-irrigated sections of the 
state burst into bloom after the rains. Then for the 
rest of the year the land is brown and dry. In irri¬ 
gated parts it is a different matter. 

But California’s largest and best honey crops come 
from both the irrigated orange ranches and the great 
unirrigated growth of wild sage in the foothills. 
Some content themselves with a crop from one source 
alone; other more enterprising honey producers 
move their bees to the sage “locations” after the 
honey flow in the orange groves has ceased. A thou¬ 
sand hives may be moved from fifty to one hun¬ 
dred miles in order that the bees may continue work 


84 


JOY RIDING WITH BEES 


85 


on a different flower source and bring more “honey 
money” into the beekeeper’s pocket. 

I read of this method in the bee journals while 
still a novice at the bee game. But my enthusiasm 
ran high. Thus when an opportunity came, I de¬ 
termined to try out migratory beekeeping on a 
small scale. 

Early in one August there was very little honey 
coming into the hives, and bees were idle and, ac¬ 
cordingly, cross. I knew of a pond, seven miles 
away, around which grew great quantities of clethra, 
or sweet pepper bush, which yields a delicious nec¬ 
tar. So I resolved to move one of my colonies to 
Spec Pond—and thus resolving, pictured a trium¬ 
phant return two weeks later with a hive so heavily 
loaded with delectable honey that two men could 
barely lift it! 

At daybreak, before the bees had begun to fly, I 
tacked a piece of wire netting over the entrance. But 
finding the netting not quite long enough, I pushed 
a little block of wood in at one end and thought 
everything would be all right. ... I empha¬ 
size the word thought because I found out that when 
one is moving bees it pays to \now that all is secure. 
. . . I also thought a veil and smoker entirely 

unnecessary. 


86 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


My father had not given in to the automobile 
as early as some; not through dislike of motor ve¬ 
hicles but because he loved horses. So the plan was 
for me to take a young horse which could cover 
the seven miles rapidly. We put the hive in the 
back part of a buggy, and my sister-in-law got in 
beside me, on her way to catch a train in the village 
a mile away. 

Off we drove gaily, with the hive projecting some¬ 
what at the rear of the carriage. We had not gone 
far before I noticed that a few bees were following 
us. I gave them little attention however, thinking 
that probably I had not closed the hive entrance 
soon enough and some early risers on coming back 
from the fields had been unable to get in, as often 
happens when bees are moved. 

My sister-in-law shooed one away, exclaiming, 
“What makes these bees follow us?” 

“Oh, they won’t follow long,” I answered non¬ 
chalantly. “They’re iust a few stragglers, but we’ll 
soon lose them.” 

But we didn’t lose them and their numbers in¬ 
creased. 

“Darn it all,” said my sister-in-law profanely, 
“You may like these things, but I don't —Let me 
out!!" 


JOY RIDING WITH BEES 


87 


I let her out and as I looked back I saw her run¬ 
ning along the road, ducking her head and fling¬ 
ing her arms like flails from side to side. 

Without looking at the hive I knew what had 
happened . . . that little block of wood should 

have been fastened securely in place. ... It had 
shaken out, and now through the narrow opening 
the bees were streaming, increasingly angry with 
the joggling of their belongings and themselves. 

They stung both me and the horse, a high-strung 
animal which, though much agitated, behaved like 
a perfect lady and did not become unmanageable. 
I had to gallop her to prevent our both being over¬ 
powered by the bees as they surged from the hive. 
In that way some were bound to lose track of us. 
But plenty found us and hurled their little javelins 
viciously into the back of my unprotected neck. 

The day was warm, and unfortunately I had worn 
no hat or coat and had not even so much as a 
pocket handkerchief with me. I wished I could 
throw the hive out somehow, but that was im¬ 
possible. To slacken speed was dangerous. . . . 

So on we galloped. I thought of stories of horses 
stung to death by bees . . . and my imagina¬ 

tion did not stop with that picture only. 

Somehow we must get home and unharness and 


88 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


fly to safety—if possible. . . . But how to turn 

around in a narrow country road? 

We came to a neighbor’s circular driveway and 
around it we swung, at a dead gallop, like Buffalo 
Bill on the Deadwood coach. 

Out of the corner of my eye I could see two 
dogs jump high in the air, then run and howl. 

On we went. A lady approached in her surrey, 
with a decorous coachman in charge. I composed 
myself and bowed sedatelv as we passed—but I 
did not dare look back! 

We drew near our stable and I began shouting 
to a man outside. He recognized the urgency in 
my tone, and when I drew rein, he undid the traces 
on one side of the horse and I the other in record 
time, and we ran the poor trembling animal into 
the stable and shut the door behind us. 

The bees, left outside in the buggy, raised riot. 
Men ran in from the garden tearing bees out of 
their hair. The butcher’s boy came jogging along 
with his feet on the dasher and a cigarette drooping 
from his lip. In an instant the feet came down, the 
cigarette fell, and the whip was pulled from its 
socket and descended on Dobbin’s back. They dis¬ 
appeared in a cloud of dust. 

Till things quieted down a little I just sat in 


JOY RIDING WITH BEES 


89 


the window and watched the show. At last I 
crawled out and dashed to the house, where I donned 
a veil, gloves, and bloomers and armed myself with 
a smoker. Taking the horse’s place between the 
shafts, I ignominously pulled the buggy back to the 
bee yard and left it there till the next morning. Then 
I retreated to the house and crawled into bed. 

My father came in with an offer to bathe my neck 
with alcohol, which I gratefully accepted. While 
doing this, he scraped thirty-three stings from a space 
two inches square on the back of my neck. I had 
other stings, too, but that was the region where the 
forces of the enemy had concentrated. 

But lest the casual reader get an erroneous im¬ 
pression from this or any subsequent incident de¬ 
scribed, and think that such experiences are of com¬ 
mon occurrence, I must explain that this was a most 
unusual adventure and not typical of the usual pleas¬ 
ant, unexciting life of a beekeeper. In conversation 
there is a tendency to emphasize the exceptional. 
So in writing, I have not dwelt on the thousands of 
uneventful interviews with my bees which form in 
my memory a background full of serenity. 

However, at the time of my “joy ride,” I forgot 
the background and was only conscious of the viru¬ 
lent effect of many bee-stings. 


9 ° 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


I felt a lively and sympathetic understanding of 
a recent experience of a friend, Mr. G. A. True. He 
had volunteered to help me during a short period 
of time with the occasional heavy lifting of hives 
in my work. I had accepted his offer with some 
hesitation as I knew the psychological effect of 
gratuitous stings on “outsiders.” I did not wish our 
friendship impaired. 

The inevitable happened—but not, I am glad to 
say, the breaking of friendship—later he sent me 
the following verse which explains what occurred. 
Not written after the style of the Italian poet or of 
Dryden, but nevertheless very apt! 

The Terrified Man —To the Terrifying Bee 
I \now you re just a little bee, and oh so very gentle. 
But when you're near, sometimes you'll hear words 
not used in a temple. 

If you want to hear pure English used, in poetry or 
prose, 

Just ma\e a social call and drop upon some fellows' 
nose. 

And when his tears have ceased to flow, and his nose 
has ceased to swell, 

You'll hear him say in a casual way, “I wish you 
ere in — well—your bee hivel" 


So great is their love of flowers 
and pride in producing honey. 
—Vergil: Georgics 


IX 

TEMPERAMENTS 

T O THE person uninterested in bees any bee 
on a flower is “a honey bee,” whereas it may 
truly be anything from a bumblebee to one of the 
little light-bodied wild bees, which closely resemble 
flies. A visit to the Natural History Museum in 
New York City will show that there are thousands 
of kinds of bees, all labeled and listed there in nu¬ 
merous glass cases. 

Apis Mellifica is the Latin name of our honey bee, 
and the best known races of this genus are the Ital¬ 
ians, the Germans (commonly called “blacks”) and 
the Carniolans. These three races have been most 
widely kept and studied. 

Considered from every standpoint the Italians 
are the most satisfactory. Good honey gatherers and 
easy to handle, one might almost call them the 
“standard” bee of America. They are also consid¬ 
ered more resistant than other races to the diseases 
which sometimes attack the brood, and are very 
attractive bees in appearance—the workers having 


91 


92 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


yellow-banded bodies, and the queens often being 
beautiful golden blondes. 

There is ordinarily no pleasure in keeping “black” 
bees, for, although often splendid honey gatherers, 
they and the hybrids resulting from a cross between 
blacks and Italians, are too vicious for comfort in 
handling. 

Some time ago, Carniolan bees were called “ladies’ 
bees,” but that term has lately fallen into disuse, since 
ladies have become women and come into their 
own! 

Carniolans, however, are very gentle and a beau¬ 
tiful silvery gray; they are industrious, but their 
great drawback is a tiresome propensity to swarm. 
In that they overindulge—from a beekeeper’s stand¬ 
point—one colony often sending out swarm after 
swarm right through the summer. The result is 
much trouble for their keeper. He must choose 
between attempting to discourage this impulse by 
cutting out queen cells from the combs every week 
or devoting much of his time to capturing swarms. 
. . . And why does a swarm so often choose to 

cluster on the topmost branches of an old apple 
tree? 

As different races have their general characteris¬ 
tics, so do different strains of a race each have their 


TEMPERAMENTS 


93 


points of difference. One strain of Italians, for in¬ 
stance, are especially good honey-gatherers; another 
may be very quiet and not easily disturbed. Another 
strain of the same race may raise quantities of brood 
but gather very little honey. Such qualities are 
transmitted from the bees of one queen to her 
descendants. 

Furthermore, each individual colony of a strain is 
a unit. The whole colony of forty to seventy thou¬ 
sand bees share similar temperaments and habits 
and can be considered precisely as one individual. 

During my experience I have answered numerous 
calls to transfer bees from buildings or trees, and 
have seldom refused such an undertaking if the 
colony was in a reasonably accessible place. 

Among these experiences I reckon as memorable 
the taking of a very powerful and very vicious 
colony of black bees out from under the eaves above 
a wooden dormer window of a big summer 
boarding-house in Shirley, Massachusetts. The 
house, known locally as the “Old Brick Tavern,” 
is a fine old building; in earlier times well known 
as a road-house and described at length by William 
Dean Howells in his novel An Undiscovered 
Country . 

The bees had lived there for many years and were 


94 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


of the most undiluted vicious strain that I ever 
encountered. A year previously somebody had 
attempted to get them out but had not gone farther 
than to rip off the boards of the ceiling, directly 
above the window, and right below the colony. 
They had not been put back, and consequently the 
colony had elongated its combs until they hung 
down about eight inches into the room in front of 
the window. As nobody dared cut off these combs 
and nail the board back in place, the room could 
not be used and the door had to be kept care¬ 
fully closed. 

Even though the proprietor seldom dared enter 
the room, he took a proprietary interest in his insect 
lodgers and had become inoculated with the bee¬ 
keeping fever. He wanted not only to have the 
use of an extra room but to have the bees on the 
ground in a modern hive and to be a beekeeper 
himself. So I accepted his request and, with him 
as an assistant, started to extricate the bees and 
combs. 

But, smoke them from below and rap the boards 
above as I might, I could not get them to stir off 
from their combs—it being so much harder to drive 
bees down than up. Therefore the combs had to 
be cut out as they were, with all the bees on them. 


TEMPERAMENTS 


95 


Moreover, to add to the difficulties, they were 
in an awkward place to get at—the tops of the 
combs too high up inside the eaves to reach with a 
knife unless I stood on a box. Also, the combs 
were very large and hard to handle, even when 
cut in two parts. They were about twenty-eight 
inches long by twenty inches deep, and heavy with 
honey, which dripped or gushed down upon my 
face at almost every cut of the knife, for even with 
the aid of a flashlight to penetrate the dark recess, 
it was blind work. Also, from the start, the bees 
resented intrusion. They concentrated on stinging 
and infuriated bees can push and pry somehow 
through almost any covering. 

Before long, the proprietor said he had some busi¬ 
ness downstairs he must attend to ... if I 
didn’t mind? I understood. 

At the end of five hours steady work, all the combs 
were out and I had fitted ten frames with good 
worker comb containing brood and honey, cutting 
the combs to fit the frames, then pressing them in 
and tying them in place with light string till the 
bees should fasten them more securely with wax. 
But the queen had not been found, and the bees 
all clustered in the cavity. 

I took out as many as I could with a small sugar 


96 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


scoop and poured them into a hive, hoping the 
queen was among them. Then moved the hive 
forward on a small table directly under the cluster, 
supposing the bees left above would slowly join their 
brood below. 

It wasn’t absolutely satisfactory but it was getting 
late and I suddenly felt very sick and faint from 
the effects of the stings and the heat of the little 
room right under the roof. So I stepped out in the 
hallway and looked about. The place seemed de¬ 
serted, although I could hear talking and laughing 
below. 

Pushing my bee veil back off my face, I staggered 
to an open doorway which proved to be the entrance 
to a delightfully cool, dark bathroom. ... It 
seemed like Paradise! I stretched myself out full 
length on the linoleum and relaxed completely. 
. . . A glass of water would have made me even 
happier. . . . After a few minutes, quick steps 
sounded on the stair and a young girl burst in. 
She rushed to the washstand in a tearing hurry for 
a drink of water, and looked neither to right nor 
left—or she would have almost stepped on me. 

“Would you mind handing me a glass, too?” I 
asked feebly, utterly unconscious of my position or 
appearance. 





Transferring a colony 
from an old-fashioned 
box-hive to a modern 
one 


And perhaps a stool 
under a tree where one 
can cool off and rumi¬ 
nate 


TEMPERAMENTS 


97 


She jumped, gave me one glance, screamed at the 
top of her lungs, and dashed away out of sight and 
sound. . . . She did not come back, and I lay 

there, feeling miserable again and disgusted with 
mankind’s (or woman- kind’s) heartlessness. 

However, before very long, my horizontal posi¬ 
tion, combined with the cool freshness of the room 
produced a reviving effect and I knew I felt better 
because I began to laugh and view the scene with 
the eyes of the frightened boarder, not my own— 

Who wouldn't scream and run if they went in 
a room and found a strange woman dressed in an 
old smock covered with honey stains, and a black 
veil nearly enshrouding her head, lying prone on the 
floor, with a devilish looking tin utensil beside her, 
emitting a steady stream of smoke . . .? 

What could that poor, innocent child be expected 
to know of bees and bee-women and their habits! 

Finally I roused myself and departed from the 
scene of action, praying to hear next morning that 
the bees had all united in the hive and could be 
moved away. Also, I felt entirely out of conceit with 
the bee business and determined to give up such en¬ 
terprises in the future. 

However, the next morning came and with it 
word that there were practically no bees in the hive, 


9 8 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


all having deserted and joined the cluster above, 
where their queen undoubtedly was hiding. 

In spite of weakness and weariness, my blood was 
up! I tackled the job again. And in the tackling, 
did a very foolish thing—one of those things most 
beekeepers don’t tell! 

After scooping down the bees and thoroughly 
exciting them, I opened the window wide to relieve 
the oppressive heat in the little room. Soon I became 
conscious that they were all on the wing and swarm¬ 
ing out through the window. Too late to close it! 

They clustered on the limb of a tall elm in a large, 
indignant bunch, high, high up above the big, three- 
story house. 

Hadn’t I better give it up, suggested the owner 
. . . ? No! 

To reach them we lashed another ladder to the 
top of an extension ladder and after a perilous- 
seeming climb, got the bees in a box and quickly 
covered it with mosquito netting, so they would not 
take wing again. And—oh joy! the queen, a little 
black old lady, was with them. . . . All was 

well! 

The following day the hive was moved and the 
boards nailed up, preventing access to any more 
undesirable tenants. We killed the old black queen 


TEMPERAMENTS 


99 


and introduced a new Italian with the natural result 
that in little over a month’s time the temper o* the 
colony had changed to a very marked degree, as the 
old bees died and the progeny of the gentle Italian 
took their places. 

I felt an inordinate pride in that big, strong colony 
and still have a very god-motherly feeling when I 
see it. 

A less troublesome experience was that of remov¬ 
ing bees living in a partition under the eaves of a 
little Swedenborgian church. The wardens feared 
lest the bees penetrate somehow into the main part 
of the church and some devout lady worshiper 
literally “have a bee in her bonnet!” 

They stipulated that if I took out the bees, no 
boards should be removed or the building injured 
in any way. This made it necessary for me to erect 
a scaffolding as high as the bees’ entrance. On this 
I placed a hive with a comb of brood and a caged 
queen, at the same time inserting a trap in the old 
entrance alongside the “hive” entrance. This trap 
allowed the bees to come out but prevented their 
return, and so induced them to accept philosophi¬ 
cally the next best thing—the hive close by waiting 
for them with a queen “ ’n everything.” 

The queen was liberated in a few days but the 


100 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


hive remained on its scaffolding for three weeks dur¬ 
ing which time almost all the “Church” brood had 
hatched and entered the adjoining hive. The trap 
was then taken out and the bees, no longer interested 
in their former homesite as such, entered and robbed 
all their own honey and stored it in their new home. 

I had a fine new colony for my apiary and the 
building was unmarred. 

Later I heard that the mouths of the church 
wardens began to water for the honey supposedly 
left in the church after the bees had been taken. 

They hired a carpenter to open up the partitions 
carefully. . . . But “when they got there, the 
cupboard was bare!” 

The combs were duly found—but empty! 



. . . oh! yet 
Stands the church cloc\ at io to 3 
And is there honey still for tea? 

—Rupert Brooke 


X 

WOMEN BEEKEEPERS 

I N THE ranks of the beekeeping world women 
are decidedly in the minority. 

Is there any special reason this should be so? 
. . . Why do not more women keep bees? Be¬ 

cause they will not orBecause they cannot} . . . 
Is it advisable for them to try? 

Answering the last question first—I see no reason 
why an ordinarily healthy, intelligent woman should 
not follow this pursuit. Nearly always, if it appeals 
to a woman, she is as well suited by nature as by 
inclination. 

I cannot believe women are too nervous to handle 
bees, for I feel sure that there are just as many 
nervous men as nervous women in this world. It 
may be that women have indulged themselves in 
their nervousness and sometimes, I fear, have even 
“traded on” their reputation for nerves in difficult 
situations. But some of the best beekeepers are 
highly strung, although they have themselves well 
under control, especially when doing bee work. 


IOI 


102 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


However, if a woman contemplates going into the 
business on a large scale, there is one consideration 
of weight. Presuming she does not care to be just 
a “back lot-er” or “side line-er” but is ambitious to 
be a commercial honey producer, she must expect 
plenty of heavy lifting. For, unless there are many 
heavy supers of honey to lift off, one is not successful! 
If she has strong arms and back and lungs, she can 
probably take care of her business alone, doing the 
lifting and everything else connected with it. 

Of course, if the woman in question can always 
have a willing husband, or male helper of other de¬ 
nomination, hovering within call, she is fortunate 
and need not hesitate about entering the field on 
that score. 

Furthermore, there are hard and easy, right and 
wrong, ways of using one’s muscles when lifting 
heavy weights. I was once advised by a noted ortho¬ 
pedic specialist to watch piano movers at work and 
notice what muscles they used. They took much 
of the weight with their bent legs, thus markedly 
lessening chest and abdominal strain. It was a 
profitable demonstration to me, as it would be to 
any woman beekeeper not of Amazonian physique. 
Short, strong backs also have the advantage over 
long ones in an occupation where there is much lift- 


WOMEN BEEKEEPERS 


103 


ing and bending—as nurses discovered in France 
during the World War! 

Thus it can readily be seen that if beekeeping is 
to be a paying proposition, it will not be merely a 
poetic pastime, though the poetry will always be 
there. But there will be a great deal of pleasant 
work—much of it outdoors. Much bending over 
hives, drawing out the combs one after another, scru¬ 
tinizing them intently. Much hoisting up of supers, 
weighing from twenty to sixty-five pounds, from off 
the tops of full hives to the ground. Nor can they 
be swung off and slammed down roughly since they 
are full of bees—and each bee well armed. 

Indoors there will be the turning of the extractor, 
unless again there is some other arm power avail¬ 
able, or unless one is financially able to have the 
extractor crank turned by electricity. 

Much must depend on circumstances and con¬ 
ditions. . . . Whether an apiary of two or three 

colonies or two or three thousand is contemplated! 
As to the tending of two or three colonies, I can 
imagine nothing more delightful for any woman, 
even if she should be a semi-invalid. Someone could 
always be found once in a couple of weeks to help 
for an hour or so—or a hive-lifting device could be 
used. 


104 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


For mental diversion, what can equal study of the 
honey bee’s habits? It is mentally impossible to open 
a bee hive and think of anything else. The organ¬ 
ized life in these busy commonwealths is something 
one can watch and ponder over endlessly. The 
more one learns what is going on, the more one 
wants to learn. There is something also in the na¬ 
ture of a beekeeper’s work which is very fascinating; 
his continual study of the meaning of it all; his need 
for niceness of perception and penetration. 

He is like a doctor, holding the patient’s hand, 
while studying his face and making his diagnosis. 
Or perhaps he might better be likened to a states¬ 
man, feeling the pulse of a nation and attempting 
to direct its policies. 

At one time I had twenty colonies of which I took 
the entire care; in addition, extracting the honey, 
bottling, and marketing it. Nearly every day I 
would have to open and go through several hives. 
My proceedings became in time somewhat automatic 
and business-like. First, a rapid, comprehensive 
survey, followed by some form of practical manipu¬ 
lation. But even in the midst of work, every once 
in a while I would have have to pause, for the 
wonder of it would sweep over me again. 

So, if the woman beekeeper is worried over some- 



If the woman bee\eeper is worried over something, 
let her ta\e her worries to the bees 

105 

































106 FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 

thing, let her take her worries to the bees. They 
will take care of them just as well as she. Further¬ 
more, they will give her something else to worry 
about—of such a different nature that it will be a 
change and relaxation to her mind. She will have 
to forget her own problems and those of her neigh¬ 
bors when the bees are swarming or she is hunting 
for the queen! 

The preponderance of the male sex among bee¬ 
keepers may be because beekeeping is a branch of 
agriculture; not distinctly a woman’s line, and only 
undertaken by individuals here and there. More¬ 
over, it seems that women generally must classify the 
bee as a most particularly undesirable acquaintance. 
The industry simply does not attract women into its 
ranks in any considerable number. So much more 
the pity, from the standpoint of one who has not 
only known its many disappointments but also its 
many more joys. 

Yet, though their numbers be comparatively few, 
there are some very fine, able women beekeepers; 
owners of a few hives kept for enjoyment and pin 
money; and real apiarists with apiaries of many 
hundred colonies. 

In several large apiaries in this country, women 
take charge of all the work connected with queen 


WOMEN BEEKEEPERS 


107 

rearing. They put artificial queen cell cups in cer¬ 
tain big, thriving colonies and induce the bees to 
build cells on these cell bases. Worker eggs are re¬ 
moved from other cells with a toothpick or special 
instrument and placed, one in each cup, on a bed 
of “royal jelly.” 

This procedure calls for a delicate precision of 
touch and results must be followed closely by a 
person well posted on bee habits. The queen cells 
are cut out when nearly ready to hatch and dis¬ 
tributed to colonies needing new queens. Expense 
of buying queens from commercial queen breeders 
by parcel post, is thus saved and especially good blood 
can be perpetuated. 

Women often assist in preparation of honey for 
market. If the honey is in the comb, the small box 
containers—“sections”—must be cleaned and the 
honey graded properly before being wrapped in at¬ 
tractive cellophane covers. 

Cellophane, being transparent, also tough, makes 
an admirable wrapper for comb honey. It is a joy 
to both the grocer and housewife. No longer will 
honey leak out on grocery shelves. No more will it 
serve as bait for flies, ants, or the thumbs of small 
greedy boys. 

Bottling honey and labeling jars is another 


108 FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 

woman’s job; they frequently are more interested 
than men in having their handiwork present an at¬ 
tractive appearance. As bees have an instinct to 
swarm and gather honey, so women have an in¬ 
stinct to make things about them attractive. Bee¬ 
keeping is only another field of opportunity where 
they may practice. 

An additional motive is that pleasure is given 
friends and visitors if the apiary has some personality 
—with flowers and perhaps a stool under a tree 
where one can sit and cool off and ruminate. 

The honey room will be spotlessly clean with a 
certain amount of order—honey labels will be neat 
and attractive. A honey exhibit may be prepared 
for agricultural fairs or flower shows with a great 
chance to work out something effective. 

There are also many delightful ways of making 
honey candy for gifts, or the extra money, ever 
acceptable to a woman of small income. 

After much experimentation, I evolved a way to 
coat small, square chunks of comb honey with choco¬ 
late, making a form of candy which met with ap¬ 
proval at Christmas time. The process was simple, 
yet painstaking. The honey had to be sliced with 
the keenest possible thin-bladed knife, heated. Clean 
cutting and a hot blade were imperative to avoid 


WOMEN BEEKEEPERS 


109 

breaking down the delicate cells in the honey comb. 
After being dipped in chocolate and then cooling, a 
little patching frequently had to be done, since honey 
will ooze through the tiniest of air holes. 

So many avenues of interest are opened to the bee¬ 
keeping student of either sex. First:—entomology 
. . . then, the study of botany . . . weather 
influences on bees and floral nectar secretion 
. . . carpentry, through nailing together 

“knocked-down” hives . . . mechanics in 

learning the gears of the extractor and the working 
principle of steam-heated uncapping knives, etc. 
. . . general observation of Nature by “lining” 

bees to trees in field or wood . . . psychology 

in marketing honey . . . not to mention the 

culture of those undramatic virtues of patience and 
perseverance. 

Financial success may come, or there may be draw¬ 
backs which prevent its achievement. But who can 
reckon happiness in terms of dollars and cents? As 
Dallas Lore Sharp once said, “Joy is Life’s best 
yield,” and regardless of the balance in the bank, 
great satisfaction and contentment of spirit always 
come to those who work in harmony with their bees. 


But bees on flowers alighting cease their hum . 

—Thomas Moore 


XI 

ODDS AND ENDS 

I T MAY be worth while to take up a little time 
and space in answering some questions which 
are often asked. And no matter how many repe¬ 
titions there may be of such questions, they are far 
preferable to the mere query of “How are the bees'?” 

Some questions and comments are as if all cast in 
the same mold—as regular and uniform as factory- 
made parts of the ubiquitous Ford automobile. 

A deadly question—“How are the bees ?”—For 
how, when there are from thirty to seventy thousand 
bees in a colony and each colony has its own strong 
individuality and difference in condition, how can 
I answer except in a general way, with a false show 
of enthusiasm: 

“Fine—making lots of honey!” 

Usually flat silence follows. Both are grateful 
when a new topic is begun. 

Sometimes this form of questioning is merely a 
greeting—with no attention paid to the answer and 
no wish for further information—a sort of identifi- 


IIO 


ODDS AND ENDS 


hi 


cation of me with my bees. Or it may be just a 
polite acknowledgment of interest in a rather 
peculiar occupation. Occasionally it is a pathetic 
and uninspired attempt to “draw me out”—an 
attempt doomed to failure. In such a case, the 
next remark is quite likely to be: 

“Don’t they ever sting you?” 

This question is put to me literally thousands of 
times, as often from men and women of real 
intellect as from the unthinking. I suppose it is 
what people generally associate with a bee—a sting. 
And I feel sure it is always asked with a hope that 
the answer may be, “Never,” thus stamping me as 
something unusual, with some strange charm, where 
bees are concerned. 

If I answer honestly, “Oh, yes, I get stung some¬ 
times, but it doesn’t amount to anything,” they snort 
half incredulously. 

Then, “What do you do for the stings?” 

Patiently, “Nothing. There isn’t anything that 
really does much good ” 

This is the real way most real beekeepers feel, 
but I strongly suspect it is not quite satisfactory to 
the layman. And often the latter seems to forget 
the answers from one meeting to the next. 

Many people, however, ask questions which show 


112 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


real interest in the subject. . . . They wonder, 

for instance, what bees do in the winter when there 
are no flowers, and how they can endure the cold 
of northern winters. On considering the long spells 
of bitterly cold weather, when for weeks the mercury 
stays in the neighborhood of zero, it is remarkable 
that a colony of bees can remain alive in its thin 
wooden-walled hive, often with no protection what¬ 
ever in the form of packing or wrapping, against the 
elements. 

But we must realize that there are many thousands 
of bees, and Government experiments demonstrate 
that when the temperature goes below 57 degrees 
the bees cling together in masses between the combs. 
By eating honey and going through various gym¬ 
nastics with wings and legs, they can raise the 
temperature within their cluster; now and again 
they change places, those more quiescent on the 
inside moving out to take up the activities of those 
on the outside. 

Their hive entrances are always left open as bees 
need, every now and then, to take what is called 
a “cleansing flight” to prevent dysentery. These 
flights are only taken in the middle of an unusually 
warm sunny day. 

In this manner do the bees pass the winter in 



The comb may be blac\ as ebony—but the honey will be clear 






9 


The bee-hunter with his spoils from the tree-hive 













ODDS AND ENDS 


“3 

northern climates after Jack Frost has nipped the 
flowers. In warmer regions they are not so closely 
hive-bound, but nearly everywhere there is a quies¬ 
cent season. 

At agricultural fairs I have heard countless excla¬ 
mations on seeing a comb covered with bees shut 
in a glass case for exhibition: 

“Oh—see the bees making honey!” 

But they do not stop to think, for if the bees are 
shut in a case without any outlet, how can they 
make honey, without any flower nectar to make 
it from? 

Another wrong impression gains ground from the 
natural granulation of honey in the jar. Actually, 
crystallization or granulation of honey is a sure proof 
of its purity. The different natural sugars in honey 
are bound to form crystals, in time—sometimes 
soon—sometimes not for many weeks. The honey 
gradually thickens or “sugars” till it is quite thick 
and white and solid. But in the process an impres¬ 
sion is often given that it is adulterated with sugar 
and is just “turning back to sugar again.” 

I have also known people to say, “Oh, I don’t like 
that honey they have at the store. It’s tasteless! Just 
sugar syrup.” 

As it happened, the honey in question was some 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


IX 4 

neutral blend, with sage predominating, and the 
displeased customer had been used to dark strong 
buckwheat honey. And those used to light honeys 
may believe that dark honey contains molasses! 

Are beekeepers immune to poisoning from bee 
stings? Somewhat, if they work constantly with 
bees and are “tapped’’ fairly often. More frequently, 
I think, supposed immunity consists in quick re¬ 
moval of stings before the formic acid has had suffi¬ 
cient time to get into the system. Another factor, I 
feel sure, is a certain professional habit of “forget¬ 
ting” stings. Anything unpleasant seems worse 
when dwelt upon; thus it is far better to consider 
stings as one would minor cuts or bruises. 

Certain types of rheumatism are helped by the 
formic acid from bee stings; other types show no 
improvement. So beekeepers, through their occu¬ 
pation, have no guarantee against lumbago! 

How far do bees fly when gathering honey? Gen¬ 
erally not more than a mile and a half, although they 
have been known to travel three or four miles when 
near-by nectar was scarce. I have known several 
such cases, authentic beyond a doubt. 

Then there is the often-heard: “I love honey but 
I don’t dare eat it because it’s so much more fatten¬ 
ing than sugar!” 


ODDS AND ENDS 


ii5 

Is that true? No, honey is not a whit more 
fattening than sugar and is much more easy to 
digest, since the bees have saved us one step in the 
process of digestion. It is an invert sugar, and 
contains many vitamins which ordinary sugar lacks. 

In an old house once inhabited by Shakers—that 
group of practical mystics, who are fast disappearing 
through lack of recruits—my attention was once 
attracted to a relic. It was an old card, on the order 
of a modern placard or poster, advertising their 
honey. A slender clover blossom was drawn on 
each side of the card and between was the following 
lettering in graceful, painstaking script: 

From soul of Flowers 
To sweeten the soul of Man . 





















So do you bees ma\e your honey, but not for yourselves. 

—Vergil: lines in Bathyllus 


XII 


HUNTING BEES 


N O SPORT is quite like that of “lining” bees— 
pursuing the honey bee to her home in the 

wilds. 

A commercial beekeeper, unless a real naturalist, 
is apt to acquire just sufficient practical knowledge 
with which to work successfully and use it mechan¬ 
ically in his beekeeping manipulations—his attitude 
being somewhat that of a superior being who guides 
the activities of his laborers, using them as tools for 
his own purposes. 

But a bee-hunter sees the honey bee working out 
her own destiny and though he may capture her 
and her colony he has had a glimpse into her free 
and natural mode of life and must marvel anew at 
her adaptability. 

James Fenimore Cooper wrote a story called Oa\ 
Openings . The scene is laid in Michigan on the 
shores of the Kalamazoo River just before the War 
of 1812, when there was much unsettled territory 
traversed only by Indians, hunters, and traders. 
The central figure in the novel is the bee-hunter, 


HUNTING BEES 


IX 7 

called by the French “voyageurs” of the region, 
“le Bourdon” (the drone), because he “lived off the 
labors of others.” This assumption was not entirely 
accurate, however, for although he lived on the 
sweets produced by others, he really had to work 
as industriously as any worker bee to find the hoards 
of honey and secure them. This in fact was his 
sole occupation, and he found it profitable. 

He lived alone in a shanty securely built to with¬ 
stand the frequent attempts bears made to break in 
and steal during his absence; honey being bears’ 
favorite food, which they can scent from afar. 

All through the summer from July to October he 
“lined” bees and stored their honey in his shanty, 
taking it away later in his canoe and selling it to 
the people living in the settlements along the river, 
who waited until his arrival to stock up their winter 
supplies of sweets. 

The opening chapters of the book describe his 
method of hunting bees, a method similar in essen¬ 
tials to that of the present day. He caught each bee 
separately in a glass tumbler, which he then set over 
a small piece of comb, whose cells were half-filled 
with clear, thin honey. Then he put his cap over 
the tumbler. As soon as darkness surrounded the 
bee, it naturally ceased fretting to get out into the 


118 FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 

light, then discovered the honeycomb and started 
feeding. 

When it was completely engrossed in its feast, 
“le Bourdon” removed the cap and before long the 
liberated bee, having had its fill, rose in the air. 
At this point the hunter’s object was to note keenly 
the larger and larger circles against the sky-line made 
by the bee as it located the position of this delightful 
source of honey and then made its final straight 
dart for home. After this line was accurately 
determined, the hunter made a cross-line or angle 
by going a hundred yards or so further on, either 
to the right or left, getting the point of intersection 
of the bee’s line of flight and thus the location of 
the bee-tree. 

Aided by his calling, le Bourdon extricated 
himself from a very serious predicament with hostile 
Indians. He so impressed them with his supposed 
power over the bees that their attitude changed from 
one of distrust and hostility to awe and respect for 
this paleface medicine-man. 

The bee-hunter accomplished this by taking up 
the bees just as they were ready to take their home¬ 
ward flight. Holding them to his ear, he pretended 
they told him where they were going. The Indian’s 
keen eyes saw the bees circle, but practice had not 


HUNTING BEES 


enabled them to see further and get the exact bee¬ 
line. They were also mystified by his covering the 
tumbler with his cap, doubtless considering that a 
further proof of necromancy. 

In a paper published in London in 1720 it is stated 
that all the bees in New England were originally 
brought in hives from England. The paper is 
entitled: An Account of a New Method in New 
England for Discovering Where the Bees Hive in 
the Woods, in Order to Get Their Honey. By 
Mr. Dudley. Philosophical Transactions Royal 
Society A. D. 1720. 

He says “The first planters in New England never 
observed a bee in the woods till many years after 
the country was settled. But what proves it beyond 
dispute is that the Aborigines (Indians) have no 
word in their language for a bee, as they have for 
all animals whatever proper to, or aboriginally of 
the country; and therefore for many years called a 
bee by the name of Englishman’s fly.” 

Nowadays there are probably few throughout the 
length and breadth of the land whose sole occupation 
and source of income is bee-hunting. But there are 
still a great many bee-hunters left—particularly in 
the more remote and rural districts of New England 
among those inhabitants of real Yankee ancestry, 


120 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


who are sharp of eye, shrewd of wit and, as Mr. 
E. H. Vaughan, veteran bee-hunter of Worcester, 
Massachusetts, expresses it, “who would rather hunt 
bees than eat when they are hungry.” 

Every bee-hunter has his own idea of the box 
which he takes with him for hunting bees, and feels 
firmly convinced of its superiority to all others. 
My box is three by five inches and about four inches 
deep, made with a top and bottom section. The 
bottom part holds the comb, and the top part is 
used to catch the bee. The top section has a glass 
cover with a wooden slide at the bottom and when 
put over the flower on which a bee is working, the 
slide is pushed in gently below while the flower is 
pulled out at the same time without injuring or 
liberating the bee. When the bee is captured, the 
upper compartment containing it is placed right 
over the lower part and a flat piece of wood is held 
over the glass top to darken the interior, so that 
when the slide is drawn out, the bee will go below 
to feed. When the bee’s attention is fully absorbed, 
the upper part can be lifted off again so the bee can 
leave when ready. 

This box is not my own invention, but was made 
for me by another enthusiast. Perhaps that is why 
I am not at all dependent on it and would really 



“Seeing only what is fair, 

Sipping only what is sweet, 
Thou dost moc\ at fate and care!* 

—Emerson 


121 



























122 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


just as soon go out as simply equipped as “le 
Bourdon”—with a box and piece of glass to put 
over it, or a tumbler (and cap!) with which to 
catch the bees and some honey comb as bait. 

The best “set-up” for the box is where one can 
get a clear, unobstructed view in all directions, or 
at least where the immediate surroundings are in 
the open. One bee is caught at a time and intro¬ 
duced to the honeycomb, which should be placed 
on a fence post, stone wall, or boulder—something 
a few feet up from the ground so that the over¬ 
head circling and departure of the bees may be 
watched with least discomfort of position. Several 
can be started at the same time if they are caught 
quickly. 

Mr. Vaughan always emphasizes the point of 
making a strong initial line, thus getting the bee-line 
firmly fixed and easy to follow. Also, if time runs 
short, it will be an easy matter to “pick up the line” 
the next day, or even several days later, as the bees 
will be on the lookout and will be making frequent 
visits to the spot where they secured such a delightful 
and unexpected “free lunch.” It is really the robbing 
instinct in bees of which the bee-hunter takes 
advantage, exposing sweets for their temptation and 
encouraging them to partake. They get in the same 


HUNTING BEES 


I2 3 


furor of excitement as they would if robbing a weak 
colony or an abandoned hive. 

The time elapsing between the bee’s departure 
and return is to be noticed; an absence of fifteen 
minutes generally indicating that the bee tree is one 



Diagram illustrating the two stations, 
the “lining” of the two courses flown 
and the location of the bee tree 


mile away. If lines are made in more than one 
direction, a little colored chalk mixed with water 
can be dabbed on the bee’s thorax between the wings 
to distinguish the different bees and confirm just 
how long each took to go and come back. If a 





124 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


cross-line is made, the point of its intersection with 
the first or initial line will be the place where the 
bees live. For, as Mr. Vaughan says, “They never 
tell lies or make false moves.” 

He adds, “When the colony is located, carve your 
initials distinctly into the bark on the tree trunk. If 
some bee-hunter has found the colony and marked 
the tree before you find it, it is courtesy among bee- 
hunters to place your initials below those already 
upon the tree, if you are not vexed—and you should 
not be.” 

I have taken bees and honey from bee trees, but 
I have never yet cut down a bee tree. They are 
apt to be large and need to be felled by an expert. 

My first bee tree was an old spreading chestnut. 
I had marked it as my own, but when I stood beside 
it, ax in hand, its girth daunted me. So my brother 
George—who successfully undertakes almost any¬ 
thing from clipping a lion’s nails to addressing 
formidable audiences in Chatauqua tents—came to 
my rescue. 

Most respectfully and admiringly I watched my 
stalwart woodsman-brother cut into the trunk with 
quick, sure strokes. Down crashed the tree, and re¬ 
gardless of reassuring lore on the subject, I could 
hardly believe that clouds of wildly infuriated bees 


HUNTING BEES 


125 


would not rise instantaneously in the air like a venge¬ 
ful army of demons. I confess we more-than-half 
crouched behind protecting bushes, on the alert for 
danger signals. But nothing terrifying happened! 

In accordance with tradition, the tree dwellers 
seemed stunned by the catastrophe. The jar of the 
falling tree frightened and demoralized them. They 
were excited, racing about or standing still, heads 
down and bodies elevated, fanning vigorously with 
their wings, as if to work off the agitation in that 
way, but they were not aggressive. So little so, that 
soon I discarded my veil, even while the tree was 
being split open near the bees’ entrance hole and the 
combs exposed to view. 

After driving them with puffs of smoke into a 
box, combs were cut out, and the best, most per¬ 
fect ones fitted into frames and put into an empty 
hive near-by. Into the hive were also dumped the 
bees. The process took very much longer than the 
description—as it is a long, sticky job. Still by doing 
it bees, brood, and honey were all saved. 

Early autumn is the preferable season for bee¬ 
hunting; the temperature then is comfortable, most 
of the honey is sealed, and if all has been well, a 
colony of bees has more honey in the autumn than 
in the early summer. The best “wild honey” is 


126 


FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 


unsurpassed, due to the long ripening, thickening, 
and mellowing in the warmth of the colony. The 
comb itself may be as black as ebony, but the honey 
will be as clear as when first put in and of superb 
quality and flavor. 

Hunting territory should be chosen in which there 
are no domesticated bees within a radius of a mile 
and a half, as it takes away some of the fun to spend 
the greater part of a day (as I have done twice) in 
successfully lining bees to someone’s hive! 

The best way to do is to set aside one full day 
for a bee-hunt. Let nothing interfere. Plan to go 
off alone or with some kindred spirit who takes the 
same delight in the same kind of things you do—and 
do not tell anyone else where you are going. New 
territory is always more interesting to work on, and 
in New England there is a joy in winding along 
little-used country roads through rural regions quiet 
and undisturbed by the complexities of modern town 
and city life. 

A day to loll about on the grass between periods of 
concentrated activity. A day to leisurely appreciate 
the full beauties of the countryside, while breathing 
in long breaths of fragrant air and basking in mel¬ 
low sunshine. 

Much of the pleasure of a bee-hunting expedition 


HUNTING BEES 


127 


lies in the relaxation of it. There is no hurry and 
no worry as one sits in the sun by a fence post with 
head tilted back and eyes following the widening 
circles of a bee, marking its location before the final 
straight, swift homeward dart. The line may not 
be discerned on the first bee’s departure, but it does 
not matter. There is plenty of time and other bees 
will come and in their turn go. 

Then there is one’s lunch to be eaten in the shade 
of some grand old pasture oak and—of course — 
before nightfall a bee tree to be found and marked. 



























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